Hi, i've had a peek through the search facility here and can't find anything that quite answers what I need, although i'm a complete novice, so I may have missed it. If you could either answer, or point me in the direction of a thread which does, that'd be great.

Yesterday my flatmate re-installed (and NTFS - I think - formatted) one of his hard drives with Windows XP on it. In the process he wiped a lot of files on that HDD which were mine, and I wanted to keep.

I've got him to shut his PC down since reinstallation, so it's off right now. Is there any way of retrieving them? A friend suggested that I might be able to find them with Knoppix or something similar. Is this so? If not, is there any freeware anywhere that can sift some of them out? They're not worth hundreds of $$$, and I know i'm likely to have lost some when he reinstalled Windows etc. but to get anything back would be good...

Thanks in advance
Joe