   HELP!
  Hi everybody, today a tragic event happened in the life of my PC:I have very many files on my computer I did not have anything to back up the large quantities of data stored on my hard disk so i bought a 200GB external hard drive. I decided to run a virus sweep and install windows updates on my computer before backing all my files up, these operations required me to restart my computer. I restarted it and I get a message saying missing some .dll  file and that my computer cant log on, then I try booting in safe mode, same thing happens. I finaly got sick of this and ran a PC recovery tool that was included with my computer. the tool said it would remove all installed applications but would not touchy any data files. I ran the tool and what do you know there is nothing left only my operating system the way it was when I purchased my computer. I was wondering, is there any way I could retrieve these lost files some of them are really importatnt to me and I would like them back.I greatly thank in advance anyone who could shed light on this grave problem of mine.Francis...   
  You might be able to recover some of your files using something like GetDataBackNTFS.I'd recommend you stop using the machine for anything but data recovery if you don't want to write over the files that were 'deleted', though -- cache files in your browser have a bad tendency to re-use critical sectors.   ;  goodluck... the recovery discs that come with prebuilt computers are generally just oem windows installs with a different looking top, the rest are just driver and application installs.even if you reformated everything you may be able to recover quite a large chunk of those files but some are already overwritten by the windows and program installs you've done. lets just hope your drive wasn't highly fragmented befoe you reinstalled... or else it will significantly decrease your chances.   ;  I have tried GetDataBackNTFS and all it gives me is files after my "system recovery" is there something else available that could retrieve my data, or maybe im doing something wrong(if so can someone please state a comon user error when using this program or link me to some FAQs)Thanks again to all who resondFrancis...   ;  Ok, first and foremost, you need a second computer to do the data recovery. You need to shut down the computer with the affected HDD and not boot from it again. The longer you use your machine, the more of your old data is being overwritten. Put the HDD into the external enclosure you just bought and plug it into another machine to do the data recovery. Make sure you don't move anything on the drive or copy anything to it until you've finished recovering your data.Now, I've used quite a few data recovery tools, and I highly recommend R-Studio for this kind of problem. Download the demo from the website, and do a full scan of your wiped drive. Make sure you save the scan data to a different drive when you do it. This scan could take an hour or more. When the scan is complete, you'll be able to browse all the files that could be located on the drive.Now, if you're really lucky, all the files you need will be recoverable, and the filenames and directory structure will be intact. If the filenames are lost, the recovery becomes more difficult, and you'll have to start deciding precisely what files you need to recover the most, and start targeting them specifically. Worry about that if it happens though. If R-Studio can locate files you want, fork up the cash and buy it. The demo will only let you recover files less than 64kb in size, but it'll let you view certain types of files which are larger than that.One thing to note is that even though data recovery software may be able to "find" your files, some or all of the contents of the files may have been overwritten. R-Studio will detect file entries which have potentally been overwritten and mark them with a red x. Any file marked this way needs to be checked manually.   