Can Recuva salvage data from a HDD that's been formatted and windows installed on top?

[stubs]

I need some help.

Basically my girlfriend’s PC screwed up lately and would not boot. We decided to re-install windows as it’s been running bad for some time now and it seemed the easy option.

All her important stuff was already backed up on my Synology NAS, but as a precaution I thought I’d dump the entire contents of the HDD onto the NAS to allow us to recover anything later.

We removed the HDD, and plugged it into the NAS with a small caddy and ran a copy. Stupidly, I didn’t check the logs correctly and it seems that not everything copied over correctly (not sure why).

We re-installed windows 7, which 1^st formatted the disk (only took about 5 seconds to format) and went about putting antivirus back on etc… Now comes the fun part:

Next we installed iTunes and I went about copying iTunes back over from the HDD dump on the Synology NAS. It turns out that all the music is somehow missing, and I think it’s part of the data that didn’t copy correctly.

 

Would Recuva be able to recover the data from the drive, despite it being formatted and having a fresh install of Windows over the top of it?

The thought of having to re-import all her CD’s doesn’t appeal to me and I know she won’t be happy about doing it.

 

Thanks in advance,

Stuart

[Augeas]

If you've run a quick format, which it appears you have, then you should be able to salvage some files. In Recuva Advanced Mode select Options/Actions/Scan for non-deleted files. Then run a normal scan.

 

Settign the View Mode to Tree might bring some coherence to the results, and Restore Folder Structure might help too when recovering.