I think you've been watching too many episodes. If you've installed a new op sys over the old drive, then I suspect that very little will be recoverable. If you haven't touched your old drive, then there are recovery services out there who charge $500 to $1000 US to recover what you had on a drive, to whatever extent possible. I don't know if there are any canned programs out there that will do it for you. I lost a hard drive some years ago, and now I backup no less than once a week, and some data is backed up real-time. Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: Marvin Hunkin To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010 13:48 Subject: Toshiba Query hi. well had to do a recovery system back to default. did not get around to getting a external hard disk. now. is there any possible recovery software that could dig up my hard disk. even though the new system has been installed. lost all my music, documents, internet feeds settings, all messages, and the star trek project. so any one got any ideas. or have i been watching too many ncis or 24 episodes where tim mcgee is able to dig up information from a corrupted or damaged hard disk or jack bauer able to retrieve encrypted data off a damage hard disk. can this be done by software and how. if so, how accessible with jaws is it. i could maybe search via google. but what would i put in as key words. need your help. marvin.