Reply #11: You can totally recover them, but it isn't cheap....

[SKKY]

...But, cheap is dependent upon the emotional attachment you have to the files. Even if you fully formatted the disk, it can still be recovered using what's called a Force Magnetic Microscope. It's tedious, and expensive. I did it on a 512mb thumb drive that was physically damaged and it cost me $700.00 dollars. Google "File Recovery Service" and see what comes up. If you formatted it multiple times, then its nearly impossible. People who fully format their hard drives need to do so more than 7 times to ensure the data is unreadable. We did an investigation on a guy who did just that, and he was flabbergasted that we could still recover the data. He even reloaded Windows from scratch thinking it would clear him. It didn't, and NCIS recovered about 97% of the original data. There are some programs out there that do a good job, but just understand it may take something more robust to recover the data, and that means more money. Good luck, and please, let us know how it turned out for you, what you did, etc.