I was working on my daughter's (George's) laptop the other night and made two mistakes. First, I was working on hardware after 8PM--this is a mortal sin as far as I am concerned. Next, I thought her drive had two partitions. It had one. I formatted both partitions. I shouldn't have. Thankfully, I discovered a program “Recover My Files” which after a considerable length of time (over 24 hours) was able to “unformat” the NTFS partitions. I, frankly was very grateful but sorta shocked as I assumed (incorrectly) that dropping a partition, creating a new partition and doing a full format would wipe the data. It does not. Each and every file on the drive was recovered (at least it looks like they were).
(Update: No, the Recover My Files program did not actually recover the data--at least it has not done so at this point. While it does see the files, when saved the files are corrupted.)
Another little issue: IBM (whose service is highly rated by Consumer Reports) sent George a “Used but Serviceable” replacement hard drive. It lasted about 18 hours before it failed. They're sending another. Perhaps it will last long enough to build a backup... This assumes that I won't be so tired that I delete the backup before getting a chance to install it. I wonder what data the replacement drive contains? Hummm, should I peek?
bv
Only low-level formats (rewriting the sectors) will completely wipe things out, as far as I know. Any other type of reformat is recoverable.