Windows 7 Understanding Windows 7 Reinstallation: Hard Drive Overwrite and Data Recovery Chances

[rhubarbpie]

When one re-installs windows7 from scratch, what part of the hard drive does it write itself on? Will it overwrite old data, so to speak starting from the first place on the hard drive or will it rather first write in between un-used space? Would it make a difference if the old data had bean removed even from the recycle bin and thus be available for over-writing or if it's e.g. deleted browsing history?

Just trying to figure out my chances of trying to recover old files after a necessary re-installation.
Thanks.

 

[Neemobeer]

It will generally write over the same place it is now. Your chance of recovering data should be pretty high. Just make sure when you recover that you write the recovered data to a different disk than you are recovering from.


Your other option would be create a bootable flash drive such as Ubuntu Linux, boot into that and simply copy your data over to a different drive, then do the re-install.

 

[rhubarbpie]

Thanks, for the info!

Do you know of any cheap software I could use to look for the old files? The re-install has been done already.

 

[Neemobeer]

Recuva (free) Windows based Link Removed
testdisk (free) Windows/Linux based TestDisk - Partition Recovery and File Undelete This one is pretty awesome. I use it for all my recovery