I recently had a drama that caused all my data to be lost over 500gb of stuff (deleted from explorer and empty recycle bin) on a few of my HDD's on my windows xp 32bit system. I need it all back asap (a lot of software for fixing pc's, games, music, tv shows etc..) is there any software i can use for this or do i need to take my HDD's to one of those shops that restore data? thanks guys any help would be extremely appreciated.

if nothing else has been writing to those drives in the meantime, the data is most likely all still there, it's just been unlinked

give ntfsundelete a go - don't install it or anything else to any of the drives you want to retrieve the data from though, put it in a usb stick if you have to and run it from there. as soon as you start writing to those drives your data may start to be overwritten

yeah jsut found that and its doing it now on one of my WD 500gb's. It still has folders on there tho that had other files and folders in them that havent been changed but its not showing files that should be there... like alot of photos and such

if that fails, stellar phoenix

rstudio

i used Recuva great program.
I used a usb drive caddy for the drive i needed to save.

ive used rstudio previously with success

getdataback for ntfs

thanks guys all sorted. :)

What ended up working for you ?