I am running a FOUR year old desktop machine on XP with SP-3. Recently I backed up all of my hard DRIVES onto external hard drives and then reformatted and repartitioned all of my drives. When I went to retrieve my photos, (all JPG format) they were not to be found.. I am totally mystified. I don't think I accidental deleted them, however, who knows. My question is; is there some way to retrieve deleted jpg files? It seems that even the files on the SD Card of my camera are gone. I would appreciate any suggestions any one may have. (Even funny ones)When you backed up your files to external drive, you didn't check, if files were there?
What's the exact situation now?
Any files exist on external drive, or it appears to be empty?BRONI:
I backed up all of the files on C:\ drive to M:\ drive and all of the files on D:\ drive to N:\ drive. M:\ and N:\ being the partion-ed external drive. Later, as I returned the files on N:\ to D:\ I deleted them from N:\, one at a time. Then I did the same with files on M:\, not noticing if the picture files from "my pictures" was among them. Frankly, I don't remember doing those or not. I don't even remember checking "My pictures' after first backing up. Anyway a few days ago I went looking for some pictures on "My pictures" and found only what was loaded from my XP restore CD. So I went back to M:\drive and they were not there either.
The M:\ drive shows that I have left the following:
DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS
NET GEAR (my router)
PROGRAM FILES
SIERRA
TOTAL CMD

What is even more confusing is that I pulled the SD card out of my camera, plugged it into the SD card reader and found it empty also. There should be approx 250 Pict's on it. I must have done something one day and I have absolutely no recall. (I am approaching my 82nd B-day). Anyway, I was wondering if there was a program AVAILABLE, like recuva, that could undelete jpg files. There is one that says it will recall the deleted files from my SD card but they want $40 for that and I am squeezing pennies these days.

So, thank you very much for looking and considering. If you can think of something to try, I will certainly give it a go. Meanwhile I have STOPPED transferring files from M:\ to C:\ so as not to mess up the drive even more.

Thanks again JIM
Surely, it won't hurt to try these freebies: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/24/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/BRONI: Thank you, thank you. That did it "PANDA RECOVERY" did the job. YOu guys have come through for me again. Bien Trabajo JIMI'm happy for you