There was a program I used to recover data from a camera memory card and an old hard drive. If the RDB (Rigid Disk Block) has been changed then the program will read the data byte by byte so have tons of electric in because it will take a long time.
Basically what the program does is use an algorithm to search out file formats such as jpg, bitmaps, etc. It's unlikely it will find exe files if you're having to do a byte by byte search. Text files it will throw into multiple files. And if you pay for the software (which depending on how important the data recovery is required) then it will find archived files too as well as find more file format types (word docs, pdfs, and other popular recognised documents). It easy to search for images but not so easy to dig out other file formats.
Even the police data recovery software is that advanced that it's not available to the public but other paid for software will do a half decent job.
If the partition is still there and not been changed in the RDB then file recovery is very easy. All you need is enough space on another hard drive to copy everything over and is much quicker than the above method.
It took me about 45 minutes to copy all the images from a 2Gb camera memory card using the above byte by byte search but I only had the filter on searching for jpg's.
Good luck!
Mental arithmetic? Me? (That's for computers) I can't subtract a fart from a plate of beans!
Warning! May contain Nuts!
