lost data on boot disk

[Jalen]

I lost data on a secondary drive and also on the boot drive where WIndows is installed. I'm getting all the data off the secondary drive no problem but I re-installed windows on the c: drive and I'm wondering if there's any chance I can recover any of the files that were there before. Mainly my email folders. I don't want to try it until I know it's not going to hurt anything to scan it to see what I can recover.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Chances to recover something afer a system was reinstalled are generally low, but it won't hurt to scan.

Consider: Something that was overwritten is lost forever. Hence the result depends on if the exact files you need were overwritten or not. This, in turn depends on

• Number of files written to volume (more files = more chance to overwrite the original filesystem entries).
• The total size of the files written (more size = more chance to overwrite data of the original files).
• The volume capacity and write order (with respect to where the original files were stored).

Cheapest of the methods to determine these factors would be just to run the recovery and see what it gives.