recover a formatted hard disk

You say you used that disk for backups - doesn't that imply that there is another disk-machine holding the data which was backed up to this one? Or are you saying you put 'backups' on the same disk? That's not exactly what you call a backup - as you just experienced.

Your chances depend on where the data was located on the disk and if that part has been overweritten in the installation process. Formatting usually does not wipe the entire disk so you may be lucky and some data can be reovered - but no guarrantee. The most important thing at this point is not to use the disk - i.e. don't start the machine. If it was my disk I'd create an image and have a look myself. But If you have never done anything like that before it is probably not a good idea. Your best chance is professional help: vogon, ontrack, ... Not exactly cheap, though.

As I said: Don't mess with it yourself. But if you absolutely want to:

- Be prepared to loose it all. - create an image on another disk and only ever run the recovery software on the image so you can always go back to the unaltered disk if it fails.

cu Philipp

-- Dr. Philipp Pagel Tel. +49-8161-71 2131 Dept. of Genome Oriented Bioinformatics Fax. +49-8161-71 2186 Technical University of Munich