Long story short, I had a HDD with load of stuff on.

I unwittingly deleted it in the Windows setup but did not format. I've tried using Recuva but it finds nothing. Is there any way of rescuing this?

Years of photos will be lost otherwise!

HELP!

I AM SERIOUSLY DESPERATE!

What would Jesus do? Probably try something like PC Inspector File Recovery.

You should always recover to another harddrive instead of trying to "fix" the filesystem and files on the fubared harddrive itself.

Thanks but just like Recuva, nothing's coming up at all! It shows as nothing deleted existing on the drive.

OMG OMG OMG panic over!

I found another thread that recomended Recover 2000. I've got EVERYTHING back and there's not a scratch on it!

I cannot tell you the relief I feel.

Groove is it restorer 2000? Never heard of recover 2000.
Thanks

Oops dammit, yes Restorer 2000.

Gets my vote.

Does any one know how well it works with raid? I have used ontrack software in the past and it works great (though new versions are insanely expensive, it used to be much cheaper), but it doesn't work with raid and Restorer 2000 pro claims that it does? I'm just asking out of curiosity. I haven't had to try to do a recovery in quite a while.

if you only deleted the partition information, there's a good change cgsecurity's testdisk can rewrite the partition table http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

for raid help, there are a few programs can can help with raid recovery.
runtime has raid-reconstructor http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-products.htm
r-studio also provides raid reconstruction http://www.r-studio.com/
there's also ufs explorer which can even do raid6 http://www.ufsexplorer.com/

just make sure you know the exact order of the disks that went into the array for stripe based arrays (raid 0, 3, 5, 6 and any raid levels based on those). I lost my raid6 array without aligning the drives, so now I have to pay $$ for some professionals to get the data back.

OK, update... turns out that I probably got about 75% of the pics back.

Still looking for the rest. They just don't appear anywhere (split drive into 2 partitions, quick formatted one of them). Restorer keeps crashing when I run it for a short while and I have to start the process again so this is proving most difficult!

I'm also trying out GetDataBack which locates plenty of files but is having serious problems retrieving them as they appear corrupt. Any tips?

I wouldn't mind getting the pictures back and actually being able to USE this HDD!

I'm not sure that this will help, but ontrack's software works very well. The only problem is that the newest versions are outrageously expensive. Maybe you can find an older version floating around somewhere. Just be careful because ontrack sold their utility suites to vcom, and only kept the recovery stuff. I think that system suite 5 was an original ontrack product that later was sold to vcom (I'm not sure if it became limited when they took it over), but ver 6, the first vcom developed one totally sucks. I did a quick format on a hard drive and got most of it back with one of the older ontrack versions (I lost many of the file names but the files were intact and could be organized by file type).

Well, an update...

Ontrack's software just didn't want to work. I swear that Windows' updates just make my machine more buggy, and it's a fresh install!

Anyway, Restorer 2000 came through in the end and stopped crashing after I did another scan. I've rescued what I can. There are a lot of 'lost files' that aren't recognisable. A few of the files that I rescued are corrupt. If anyone cares to help me with that (I'd be grateful!), I made a thread here.

Cheers guys!

Unless I am mistaken, there is a way to make the drive read only, preventing any software including windows from writing anything to the disk. If you can get that done, then trying several softwares shouldn't hurt anything. There are several that offer free trials and some of them will let you see what can be recovered with the free trail. Beyond that I think there is just professional recovery services left, but they are not cheap. Fyi, are you using vista? It so, it wouldn't surprise me if that is part of the crash problems (seems that multiple programs are having stability problems). If so, why not try it in a windows xp machine (see if you can do it on a friends computer if you don't have an xp machine).