Recovering info. from hard drive

[onway]

My computer crashed last week and,of course,I did not have any back-up done.
I gave it to repair man to see what he could do and he said that he would save whatever he could from old hard drive and put onto new one.Now I have computer back but nothing from my old hard drive has been recovered.Is it possible that absolutely nothing could be saved or might he just not have bothered that much.........

 

[j26]

Has the drive been reformatted and the operating system been reloaded onto it?

If so, I'd say you're out of luck.

If not, and you have another computer, you could take out the hard drive and try using a recovery program - there are guides to using them online if you google for them.

 

[DrMoriarty]

I've been impressed by Recuva (freeware), but as j26 says, the more the drive has been accessed/written to, the less you are likely to be able to retrieve.

 

[AlbacoreA]

Any part of the disk that hasn't been overwritten (the free space) is often recoverable. Formatting does not delete data.