Here's a good one...

A friend asked me to "fix" his computer.. (it was running slow). I don't have time to mess around, so I told him to back up the important stuff, and I'd come over and format/reinstall Windows... install the drivers.. get the Windows updates for him.. then he's on his own.

When I was running the Windows CD.. where it asks you to select partitions and all that neat stuff..  I saw several partiions. He said some other guy had set up a FAT32 partition(so he could run old software).. but there were other partitions. I went ahead and delted them all, but they didn't "go away" from that screen. I went ahead and installed Windows on the biggest partition.

WELLLLLL.. it turns out that two of the other partions were actual drives (he didn't even know that there were two HDDs).. no big deal except one of those "other" drives was a USB flash drive.

You guessed it .. that flash drive  was  his backups. When he tried to retrieve data from it..  OBVIOUSLY, it said that the drive was not formatted.. UGH !

Being that I cleared it by simply deleting the partition, nothing ever got written to it.. so I'm hoping that some sort of "un delete" can get to his stuff.

I've seen some software for doing that (even describing exactly what happened, as a problem it's a cure for).. Before I start messing around.. I was wondering if any of you have tried this type of recovery before ?