need help recovering data from formatted hd

[tarek]

Today I formatted my laptop's hard drive and had started reinstalling Windows when I realized that I had forgotten to back up some important stuff. I stopped the installation before setup copied the files to my hard drive and restarted for the first time. What software (preferably free) will I need to perform a recovery on this drive? I will be borrowing a USB enclosure tomorrow, but in the mean time I was considering doing the freezing technique. How long is too long to leave the drive a the freezer?

Using either method, how likely is it that I can recover all/most of my data? Here is some other info which may be relevant:

HD size: 40gb
Amount of data I need: ~5gb
used quick format
windows setup only copied about 10% of files before i stopped

[tarek]

one thing i just remembered. i actually formatted my laptop twice today. the first time i did a backup by moving all the files i needed to a shared drive on my desktop. after reinstalling the first time, i copied all my files over from the shared drive and deleted them from the shared drive. is there a chance i could recover it from my desktop? i didn't 'delete' the files, i just did a cut/paste, does that make any difference? i had to format a 2nd time because i installed the uxtheme patch and it caused problems with explorer.exe so i figured i have nothing to lose and formatted again. everything after that i explained in my last post.

also if i do the freezer method and it doesn't work, would it complicate using software to recover the data at all?

[Jordie]

I suggest grabbing the data from one of your regular backups, it's by far the easiest way.

Thankfully you only did a quick format and it 'should' be easy to restore the lost files. Free is another thing though, you could try one of these utils, but I've never used them so no promises.

Good luck.