Windows 7: Any ideas?!

My husband installed windows 7 yesterday ( He no computer genius!) and has managed to wipe everything off computer, including a lot of importnat and ireplacable things! I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how i could go about retrieving these items? I had no file back-up,, silly i know but didnt expect to have to use it!
Many thanks!

Have a read through this: How To: Recover deleted files from Windows or Mac OS

Here is a video on the subject too, Different software but the principle is the same.

Hi and welcome to sevenforums, there are some softwares that will recover files that have been erased off the computer one is aesus recovery ,(not free) and another called recova
HERE, however im not sure how it will perform recovering data after what seems to have been a clean install.
sorry to say a vital lesson in backing up important and irreplacable data.
i have all my data stored on an external hard drive to avoid such mistakes .
good luck in recovering you files.

Depending on how the install was done there may be a Windows.old folder on your hard drive. If its there, your documents, pictures, etc from the previous OS should be in there. Be advised that the more you use that PC the less likely it will be that you can recover your stuff. Every time windows writes to the hard drive it can potentially write over data you want to recover.

I'm so sorry this happened to you Kymi! I know it can be devastating.

Below are three recovery tools that some posters on another excellent forum have used with good results when others failed. But a couple of words of caution before you use ANY recovery software: because you have a more-or-less unique situation, be sure to check out all of the options before you actually use any one of them. Although most recovery software products just scan your system before they actually change it, you don't want to take a chance that ANYTHING is done to your system until you are absolutely sure what course you want to take. That also goes for writing any files to your system or making any changes of any kind. The more you use your computer, the less chance you'll have of recovering your old data.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition - can restore lost data even if the partition is formatted or deleted, restore data from corrupted hard drive, virus infection, unexpected system shutdown or software failure. It support IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB hard disk, memory card, USB flash drive, CD/DVD, Blue-Ray Disk, iPod.

MiniTool Damaged Partition Recovery module is a powerful data recovery module of MiniTool Power Data Recovery. This data recovery module focuses on recovering data from damaged or formatted partitions. As long as the partition is existing, you can use this data recovery module to recover data from the partition irrespective of whatever happen to cause the data loss. And this data recovery module not only supports MBR-style partition, but also supports Windows Dynamic disk volume. For example: Simple Volume, Spanned Volume, Stripped Volume and RAID-5 Volume.

MiniTool Lost Partition Recovery If you cannot find the partition you like to recover in this data recovery module, you need to use Lost Partition Recovery module, designed to recover data from lost/deleted partitions. This data recovery module can help to recover your data when your hard drive crashes, MBR is corrupted, a disk is repartitioned (fdisk), and a partition is overwritten when you use data backup software to restore the disk image.

Kymi22 , any progress, or have you been arrested for killing your hubby !

Thanks boohbah!!! Best laugh I've had in a long time!

I don't think she will do that, because there will be nobody to blame next time something else goes wrong.

After a clean install, Windows reformatted the hard drive and then wrote a lot of new data onto her drive - Her data is probably gone for good