recovering RAW files from formatted partiton

I was wondering if any of you have successfully recovered RAW files that have been formatted over on a hard drive, and if you have, what program did you use to get it done?

I used an app called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard that recovered RAW files from a mistakenly formatted hard drive but was unreadable in PS CS5 saying "it could not complete your request because it is the wrong kind of document."

The problem occurred when my primary active hard drive died which hosted the operating system. I replaced the hard drive (150 GB WD Velociraptor) with a new one, but when I did that, for some reason that I haven't determined yet, the BIOS did not recognize the new drive and the operating system install routine pointed to a 1 TB drive that had all of my media files on it, including music, video and pictures in RAW, TIFF and JPEG and recognized it as a 130-something GB drive (the limit a non-service pack WinXP install can see?). Thinking that was just about the actual size of a 150 GB raptor drive I assumed it pointed to the correct newly installed hard drive and proceeded to delete the partition, re-format it and installed the operating system in it.

To my utmost horror, when I opened the admin tools/storage management function in WinXP to check if all the hard drives were recognized, I saw that the hard drive with all my media files on it had a chunk of it re-partitioned with the operating system installed on it and the newly installed hard drive was nowhere to be seen.

I have seen it happen that a recovery program created RAWs with the .tif extension, because most RAW formats are built on the tif frame, Check that your restored files have the .CR2 extension.

Have you been able to solve this ? with another software or something else? Im in the same position and all the recovered files are not readable.

thanks!

Pm the member because I don't think the subscriptions carried over to the new forum over a year ago.