Recovering a partition

During my windows xp setup, the letters of the partitions were switched around. As a result, I formatted the wrong drive. Is it possible to retrieve the files back?

 

Unfortunatly you are pretty much out of luck.
Once a partition is formatted ithe data is usually just gone for the average home user.

There are programs the can get data back off of a formatted hard drive partition but the programs are very expensive & not something the average home user would have.

 

did anything get written to the drive?
If not, you may be in luck if it was only a quick format. Just the master file table would have been wiped, the data should still be on the physical disk.
I posted some info here that may be able to help:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showpost.php?p=1347451&postcount=12

 

Windows XP Setup gives you a choice of which format to choose ... which did you??

You can try rePairing the partition, which sometimes works. Re-insert and boot from your XP disc. Press R when prompted, select the XP OS and enter the Administrator password (press enter if there is none), then type these commands, pressing enter after each. Where # is the drive letter.

cd #:
fixmbr #:
fixboot #:
chkdsk /r #

 

im not sure that will work as the drive has already been formatted (tho im not so sure, so you can try it) , you can try some recovery software to see if it will pick anything up.
this one works from within windows. I wouldn't keep booting from the partition you want to recover files from, as it will be harder to recover.
http://majorgeeks.com/Recuva_d5514.html

this one is shareware, but i think it will let you use it once or maybe it's a week, i can't remember
http://majorgeeks.com/Active_UNDELETE_d4268.html
it's a bootable iso, so you can create a bootable cd.