wow...you dont believe in asking the EASY q's, huh? lol
i troubleshoot computers for clients. Yah, i'm like the tech dude. (or is that trouble and shoot their comps? never mind...lol) I always tell them if they didnt have a backup, the data is lost. They fret about it (especially the guitarists...lol...i kill myself with my droll wit...) But some clients arent home power users...they are business types with much-needed information on their hard drives.
Sadly, some of these people have heard of data recovery services. These are specialists that you pack up the hard drive in question, without formatting it, and they extract any useful data files, or partial data files they can. Be prepared for some sticker shock. The better rep a company has at this, the skys the limit on cost. But some of them are pretty good at it.
By pretty good, i mean that depending what was wrong in the first place, sometimes they only have to replace a file allocation table, or a blown boot sector, and you get it ALL back...not often, but it happens.
also by pretty good, if you get ANYthing retrieved, well, thats something, if the data is THAT damned crucial right? getting 30% of the database back is better than 0%, right? The data many times came back in "stripes", i called it, because it wasnt whole files...images of houses for sale were partial, we had to locate the image that was the bottom half of the house, and try to fix it in a paint program. Huge databases, if the size of the individual records was comparatively small to the chucks of data recovered, might have a couple hundred records intact in chunks here and there.
data recovery is half science, and half black arts. And be prepared to spend some cash, and i dont think anyone will guarantee whole files. I'm assuming partial files are not what would do you any good? Lets talk about what you CAN do.
if you search the web diligently, there are a lot of programs called utilities that might help. I dont know what your "tech" level is, but if youre comfortable with DOS and you can tell the program what cluster size, size swap file, etc etc you were using, some of these can give pretty good results.
TIP: you said delete files was what happened...this is GREAT. A computer doesn't actually delete files, not right away. Its best explained by analogy. Picture a huge library that doesnt throw books away, it only removes the crd catalog entry. Thats kinda the same thing s deleting it right? Until a book needs a shelf space where a "deleted" book resides, only then will the old book be actually thrown away (computer=overwritten). Since you yanked the plug, that means you haent been using the computer at all? then you have a chance at doing this yourself. Search free downloads and free disk utilities for "undelete" programs. Youd be surprised how many of them there are, and how many are freeware, or free to try. I would ALSO get a small hard drive, anf format it and put windows on it, pretending the old hard drive was bad. I would connect the hard drive with data on it as a second (slave) hard drive. Then i would get a decent undelete program and try it. Putting the question drive as a slave data drive will prevent windows from moving stuff around and potentially overwriting the data before you have a chance to recover it. When you "delete" stuff, its just marked empty, and the computer feels free to overwrite it. As a data drive, it wont do this.
In the future? blank CD's are cheap, and fast burners are cheap...archive sound files on CD's as data. Hell, treating a DVD burner like a data archive allows several gigs to be stored on each blank dvd. Do this regularly.
also, use a small (10 gig) hard drive as your system drive, and a big (80-200 gig) hard drive as your slave (data) drive. The system drive is way more likely to bomb out, but if all your songs abd important data is on the second drive, you can reformat the system drive and dump your software in it in a flash and be up and running in no time, and your data's still on the second drive. This is the way to go.
The "ne plus ultra" is to have 2 huge datd drives, same make and model and size and speed. Once week, you "copy whole partition" onto the other, unused data drive IE, c is system drive, d is main data drive, e is backup data drive, once a week you copy whole partition d onto e...kinda like youre treating a big hard drive like its a burnable CD. I live in southwestern Pennsylvania...if you HAPPEN to be fairly close to me, i might be able to help, but it would get expensive real quick if you were any distance from me, or if we had to send the hard drive out.
I would try getting a small, new system drive, putting this drive as a data drive and looking for the undelete free utility. You have a 50-50 chance of recovering all your files this way.
