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 (http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/#datarecovery), but I've never used them so no promises.

Good luck.