My PC crashed...can I recover the information?

That sucks... I actually lost my computer for Christmas too... Had to reformat everything due to a stupid virus... but anyway...from what I've found data recovery is nothing but expensive... if your data has be overwritten, you can pretty much consider it gone... Granted if its really that valuable to you there are some expensive options for recovering data that has been overwritten but I don't really advise this... the last time I looked into it it was something like $2500 for recovering a 500gb HD... I forget who was gonna do that recovery.. I think it was someone through western digital but all the same I'm sure you can find a reliable company on google pretty easily..

Sad to say, this was the worst thing you could have possibly done in this situation - you essentially took the one chance you had to recover your data and ruined it.

By letting your computer restore itself to the original factory build you wiped out all the data you are trying to recover. Which is too bad, as you likely could have got it all back with a simple boot disk.

Don't waste your time with the data recovery, the image restore you did will make that extraordinarily expensive and probably impossible.

Not sure how you setup your e-mail, if it's POP then you probably lost it (unless you elected to keep a copy on the mail server), if it's IMAP then you're OK.

Hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, especially at the holiday season. Your New Years resolution is obvious - back up everything!

Bill

One more thing to think about that most people don't (including me, until recently).

Even having a backup on DVD's or a backup hard drive is NOT ENOUGH. Think about it - if you had a fire, or a tornado, or (fill in the blank), not only would your primary computer be toast, but so would the backup.

Really important stuff that you can't live without should be backed up OFF PREMISES. Make a copy on DVD or a backup hard drive and give it to a friend or relative for safekeeping at a different location, rent a safe deposit box and store your backups there, or backup online using a service like iDrive or Carbonite. Better yet, use a combination of those.

A friend nearly lost everything in a flood this past spring, and it made both of us realize the importance of off-site backups. I'm backing up online with iDrive now, and for 2011 both of us plan to exchange backups on external hard drives at least monthly.

Hope this helps even one person to NOT lose their data!

Brenda

Hi! I remember that there is a free linux application which you can run to retrieve your data even if the hard disk is not readable by Windows.
Will get back to you when I locate it.

I can relate. My 1 TB external drive crashed and I figured everything was gone.

The first thing I did was to buy a small external drive so there would be backup *IF* the data could be recovered. I checked online reviews to find some recovery software, and went for it. The first software didn't work, but the second one worked just fine (DiskInternals NTFS Recovery.)

After using the software, I still didn't have access to the old drive, but at least almost everything was recovered.

And then a Merry Christmas present appeared ... when I started up my computer, the old drive was still on and attached. Scandisk said there was a drive that needed to be checked, and sure enough, all that lost data was recovered.

I now have a backup .

Files can sometimes be recovered if the disk was formatted or files erased.

The software I used is free to check out your disk. At the end of the process, you will see a list of files that can be recovered.

At that point, you can buy the software to do the actual recovery and you will know if the files that can be recovered make it worth it.

My only complaint with DiskInternals NTFS Recovery software is they indicated it was $99.00 to buy, but then ended up charging $139 or so including a one year license . I would have still gone with it had they made the total known upfront since it did the job. But doing it the way they did left me with the impression I was dealing with a company I would rather not deal with.

Marvin

You can use recovery softwares to recover your data, I was having same problem and got my most of the datas back using recovery softwares