Recovery contacts from formatted drive

I installed windows 7 beta on my AAO however I've now discovered I've lost some email contacts. Is there any way I can recover these, any undelete application that runs under windows but can recover from linux partitions.

 

If you partitioned, formatted, and overwrote the drive this will likely be impossible. Despite the idea of super-drive-forensics that can get data off a drive until it's been overwritten 7 times, the reality is that overwritten bits are gone.

The kind of software you're talking about only "undeletes" things that had a character changed at the beginning of the file so Windows doesn't show them in a directory listing. The file is still there. Until the space on the drive where the file was is overwritten, they're recoverable. Once the space where they resided has been overwritten, they are not recoverable.

If it is a separate partition that has not been overwritten or formatted, or if you're feeling fearless, try testdisk which is easily run from the gparted livecd. It can potentially recover lost partitions, but if you've overwritten the partition table, it's not likely to help.

I highly recommend partimage to backup entire partitions to avoid this kind of data loss in the future. Good luck!