I installed windows and need to recover what was there before

[daveanddeb]

Hi,

I accidentally installed windows XP Home onto a drive that contained my downloaded music folders. Is there any way I can get those back?

Thanks,

Dave

 

[WyomingKnott]

Certainly not all of it. The problem is that the install wrote gigabytes of files to the hard drive, and any music file that had its storage overwritten is dead and gone.

Aside from the obvious "Do backups from now on," there are a number of programs that can scan the drive and look for recoverable files. Clonezilla comes to mind, but browse the forum for others in threads about corrupted drives.

(If I get un-lazy, I'll scan the threads and build that list myself.)