firstly hi to all. i've searched through the forum for any ideas/answers, but unfortunately not found anything suitable.

i have a 300gb drive that i've messed up and would like to try and get the data back of it. i need to attempt this myself as it's out of the question to pay someone for 300gigs of recovery, from the prices i've seen on this forum. also the data would be nice to get back, but it's not that important. it's full of films, and nothing dodgy i hasten to mention.

this is what happened, bare with me;

i got given an old pc with a corrupt root drive, loads of popups and adware and it was almost impossible to use. i tried to format the root drive, but the machine simply wouldn't let me. this drive with all the films was a secondary drive.

i set up the 300gb drive as a primary, and i thought i'd install an operating system on it and ditch the corrupt drive.

when the install procedure went through a hardware check and it came back and told me what harddrives were in there (the 300g primary, 40g secondary). the capacaties didn't match up.

at this point i thought, no it's going to mess things up, so i aborted out of the installation.

i refitted the drives as original, i.e. 40g primary with o.s. and 300g secondary.

now going into control panel, admin' tools, comp' manag', storage. the 300g drive is seen as unformatted, and needs to be formatted to be in use/active etc. bummer!

i downloaded numerous recovery programms. but to no use. no of them saw anything. i bit the bullet and formatted the drive so it was healthy/active and attempted to use these undelete/unformat recovery programms. still no use.

during my brief o.s. installation attempt, at no point was the 300gb drive formatted etc, didn't get that far.

i'm under the impression that original data is still on the drive as magnetic/electrical charge, even if deleted/formatted. untill the sector/piece of drive that held that piece of data is re-written to. the data is then lost forever.

what do these data recovery operations do/use that i can't do/get myself.

thats it, sorry for going on abit, but i know how important it is to get all the facts etc. anything i can do or any programms out there that actually do what they say on the 'tin' so to speak.

thanks for any info in advance. regards.