"Wiped clean" means what it says. When you reinstall an OS using the standard (automatic) method, it warns you that it's going to reformat your drive. You seem to be aware of this b/c you admit that your "hard drive was wiped clean." There are expensive, forensic methods for trying to restore data from a formatted drive, but they're usually performed by federal agents gathering evidence on terrorists. I believe they use special software that moves the heads slightly off-cylinder to see what they can find. It's similar to recovering the lost 18 minutes from the Nixon tapes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_tapes There are also private companies that specialize in recovering data from damaged drives, but it's labor-intensive and they charge hundreds of dollars. Even then, I don't know if they could recover anything after a drive has been reformatted and the OS has been reinstalled. This is where you reach into your safe and pull out the backups you've been making every week or month. I've installed a 2nd HDD in all my PCs and I use it for fast daily backups. Once a month or so I backup my data to DVDs. I have a stack of DVDs going back several years. They're cheap. I buy the write-once type. I also have each HDD partitioned, with the OS in its own, separate partition. All my data is stored on the other partitions. I back up only my data every night to the second HDD. It takes only a few minutes.