Recovery software

The power supply went out on my tower and corrupted my boot sectors before I could diagnose the problem. This was preceded by my fans getting really noisy making me think my machine was overheating but monitoring proved they weren't.

So I replaced the power supply with one that was 700-800 watts (last one was about 500) and got a new tower with more fans and more room (the front fans don't work for some reason) and got a new video card as the last one turns out to have a reputation for overheating.

The Windows I had wasn't able to recover the Windows 10 - it was upgraded from Windows 7. It is not able to restore a Windows boot sector. My buddy gave me a license for a new version of W10 but it also is not able to recover old versions, which he said normal for this very new version. In fact, it was a recommended that it be used with a new install.

Which it did and wiped everything.

Long story short, is anyone aware of the best tools for recovering overwritten files? My knowledge of them is out of date now.

I've barely used this machine in order not to lose them and because it's going to be a lot of work getting it back to where I want. Also, the liquid cooling fans are too loud still and the case fans don't work so good bet I'm going to replace those too as soon as I get a job.

thanks.

I'd suggest creating a Hiren Boot Disk, which is based on Windows PE, and comes with several data recovery tools to try. I'd try them all - any decent recovery software should only try to scan what it can recover, and not do anything destructive if you recover to another disk.

Bear in mind that nothing will recover files that have actually been overwritten. What can be saved is the data that still resides on the disk, but has been marked as deleted by the filesystem. If some files have truly been overwritten by your new installation, I'm afraid they're not coming back.

You could try using a repair system (if such a thing exists, but I think it does) running Linux from CD-ROM or from DVD.
But, in the end, it might probably be wisere to get your HD to a professional recover service ? I don't know how exppensive this might be, though.

In 2006 I could recover many files from a soft formatted (!) Hard Disc with Ontrack EasyRecovery. I don't know if they are still good.

I've used Stellar Phoenix's software a few times to recover files from corrupted Windows filesystems. Always worked well for me. They have a free version with some heavy limitations, but you can try it out to see what it could recover.

https://www.stellarinfo.com/windows-data-recovery.php