Possible file recovery

A friend just reformatted an XP machine after hopeless attempts to fix. Problem is he deleted MANY of his wife jpeg files form vacations and last years cruise. Is there a way to recover those pics after the drive has been reformatted?

 

did he install windows on it yet or is still in the formatted / NO OS stage?

 

Yes, he has already installed Windows back on machine.

 

chances are very bad that he'll get anything off it. I'd say close to 5% chance of getting anything once he's written alot of data to the drive. He can try it. but he best not install anything else on the drive. Take it out and put it in another machine. Install the recovery software on the surrogate machine and scan the "recovery" drive.
I like GetDataBack for FAT or GetDataBack for NTFS depending on what file system he used with XP on the "recovery" drive when it was working.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html