Looks like it'll have been stomped on by FAT32 then ...
... judging by the limited snippets of the web I can see behind the office firewall. Not pretty at all, sadly.
(BrianHequator was stretching owls, on, or around, Tue 7 Jun 2011, 13:40, 1 reply, 15 years ago)

FAT32 is still readable by Windows, I think.
Perhaps you could get the computer to boot from the optical drive and bung an Ubuntu disc in, and have a look around the contents and see what is there?
(The Luggage is haunted..., Tue 7 Jun 2011, 13:44, Reply)

Yes FAT32 is still readable by Windows
It's still the most 'accessible' file system.
( Labia Majora You keep on talking but it makes no sense at all, Tue 7 Jun 2011, 13:46, Reply)

Goodo.
Then what's to stop him using a smaller drive as a boot drive, and then rigging up the main one as a slave, and running recovery software on it?

From what I remember, stuff marked for deletion under Windows isn't actually deleted, it just lops a letter off the end of the file name.
(The Luggage is haunted..., Tue 7 Jun 2011, 13:49, Reply)

The problem is he's likely overwritten the MFT of the NTFS partition
Which keeps a 'list' of where parts of each file are stored. If that's not recoverable, the data is lost in unallocated clusters.
( Labia Majora You keep on talking but it makes no sense at all, Tue 7 Jun 2011, 13:51, Reply)

Ah, that could be problematic.

(The Luggage is haunted..., Tue 7 Jun 2011, 14:00, Reply)