"If your drive was a Win2K or WinXP drive formatted as an NTFS volume, your chance of recovering anything without going to a recovery service, i.e. a professional, are very low."

I would disagree with that statement - I have had very good success on a couple of occasions recovering data from disks - once from a damaged disk, once from a formatted disk - both times NTFS.

I have used a program called File Scavenger http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
It's only $40 - you can download the demo and see if it finds stuff before you spend any money on the full version that can actually do the recovery.

Saved my butt when I had a partition go away due to a failing drive.

Take your "lost" disk and install it in your new computer. Install the recovery software on your new computer and when you run it save the recovered files to the main disk in your new computer.

Per the advice already stated - DON'T WRITE ANYTHING to the disk you are trying to recover data from.

Good Luck!

karl
Cheap Tracks