Hard drive recovery

[iviv]

Right, a bit of help for my friend please.

Her computer died about a week ago, apparently the motherboard blew. some guy from church offered to help fix it, and ended up formatting the hard drive. Though windows hasn't been reinstalled or anything yet, as the computer still isn't fixed.
Now, I know there are loads of programs out there that can recover deleted files and drives, but I've no idea what is good and what isn't.
The computer that died was running XP, and at the moment she is using an old windows 98 computer. What options are available?

I was thinking that rather than reinstalling windows and installing a file recovery program, it may be easier to plug it into the second computer and install the recovey program on that one, as it will make sure that none of the data would be overwritten. However, win98 is fat32, and I'm guessing that the XP install would have been ntfs, so I don't know if this would be possible.


tldr:
Formatted hard drive. Probably ntfs. easiest/cheapest way to recover the data?

 

[Scort]

Try this clicky.

Scort.

 

[iviv]

Thanks, it looks like it should do the job.
What would be easier when actually recovering the data? Plugging the hard drive into the older computer and installing the program on the old drive? And will this work, since the two drives will probably be different file systems.
Finally, how does the process work? I know its something like when you delete the data it isn't physically gone, just the information on where to find the information is wiped. Does this mean that when recovering the files, you don't need lots of free space? Or do you need free space equal to the size of the files you are recovering?

Thanks

 

[helmutcheese]

The best: http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm