Data Loss - Formatted HD, Pendrive not recognised

[rodmallia]

Hey guys I've got a problem here. I recently decided to repair my Win XP - you know, there is that facility of re-installing without formatting and what not. I did not have any backups (fault #1) so I decided to go that route. But for some reason the re-install didn't work out and I ended up with a corrupted drive. I ultimately managed to get through by re-installing WinXP on my second HDD, and logging in on safe mode. From there I proceeded to backup my important documents to my USB pendrive and breathed a sigh of relief. I left the pendrive plugged in (fault #2), restarted the PC and formatted the drives and re-installed windows. After that I proceeded to partition the HDD, update windows, reinstall stuff and put back in some 18GB of my music library. Then I proceeded to transfer the contents of my pendrive onto the HDD and horror of horrors, I got the message "The drive is not formatted. Do you want to format now?". So now the situation is dire. I desperately need those documents.

Where should I attempt to get the documents from: my fried pendrive or my newly formatted, partitioned HDD that has been seeing lots of installations and updates? I just got to know that use of the HDD will decrease the chances of data recovery...

The recovery software I used isn't really helping. I managed to get a couple of files (a very small percentage) out of the whole folder but they are corrupted and unreadable. They are either full of symbols or else a million 'Y's all over the place.

Any insight on what to do (apart from despairing) would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Rod

 

[Santei]

well, i agree with faults u've mention.
What recovery software did u use?
Why don't u ask the same question to ur pendrive developer company's support team?
The thing is there thousands of recovery tools and all of them are usefull in different situations/HDDs.
Anyway, wish u a good-good luck.
u will need it