My brother-in-law took a failing HDL to Data Doctors and they were able to
recover his data so it is possible if you are willing to pay the cost. It
took days and cost a couple hundred dollars but recovered decades of family
photos that could not be replaced.
From a technical point of view, a recovery of a reformatted HD is possible
but uncertain. Formatting does not really destroy data on a drive but does
destroy the table of data anoint each file such as the name, date created
and all the rest of the directory and folder info. Another issue that makes
it difficult to recover is that when Win-7 was loaded, none of the sectors
of the HD that were a part of the catalog and/or image files were reused.
While it doesn't actually make recovery impossible, it does make it more
difficult and adds uncertainty regarding file content. DOD security
standards require a minimum of three write passes per sector to
securely erase a file to prevent recovery but each pass does make recovery
that much less certain. There is no way to be absolutely certain a sector
was not reused since the architecture of a HD guarantees your file will be
written into scattered sectors. If you have the original photos, you may be
better off just rebuilding your catalog. If you have a backup, restore from
that. If you don't, it is time to start thinking about a backup/recovery
strategy once you get things back together.
