Hard drive recovery stuff.

The odds are, the data structure is irrecoverable. However, if it was just a regular format, or partition failure, then R-Studio may be able to recover a significant amount of data. This will only work if no active data has been written to the drive, such as a virus that wrote the drive with 1's as it was formatting. Get the demo, and bring your friends hard drive to your machine, and do a full scan. If you see more than five partitions, or if there is no green colored partition, it may be too far gone and thus not worth it.

Good luck. This method has helped me many times .

PS. Happy new year, my gift to you is a 12oz concentrate of Orange Glow .

getdataback worked fine for me once... they have both NTFS and FAT32 version

www.runtime.org/

it scans the disc and detects the partion layout. If you are lucky the partition layout backup, which is normally about in the middle of the disc was not affected by the format, and it's going to be even easier.

It's pretty much a safe passive method to recover the data since you are not trying to rebuild the damage disc. You scan, detect the layout, make a map of ALL files on the disc and determine which one are readable/damaged etc. And then you can recover to another disc. The con is that you need another disc.

Easy Recovery Deluxe. Worked well for me. But don't go for tryout version it'll work for hours on your harddrive just to restore the first 20 files and nothing else.

R-Studio is the best recovery software I've ever used. I have recovered deleted data, folders, accidentally formatted partitions that had been later partially overwritten (yeah, i lost about 50mb), and even a virus-infected partition table (lucky me, R-Studio found the backup MFT table that NTFS always writes).

You'll have the most luck with R-Studio, because you can get so much with it if you dedicate a little more time to it.