Vista - Accidental Format

When I tried to install Vista, I had my external hard drive connected to the
computer. It had all of my important files. Unfortunately, both my main Hard
Drive and my External are 250gb, and I accidentally chose the wrong one to
format. Now, I haven't really done anything else with it and I've seen
mention of programs that can save your old data even if you've apparently
formatted as long as you haven't used the space you opened up. Is there any
truth to this, and if so, what would be the best program to use for this?
This is quite depressing, and I'm in such a state of shock I can't even grasp
the immensity of what I have done, possibly wiping away 4 years and 250gb
worth of files stored over that time..

My apologies, the site told me there was an error and the post wasn't sent..

You can try R-Studio or Stellar Phoenix NTFS recovery.... they have trial
ver. The trials won't let you recover the data but if you can see it all or
most then you could purchase a key.

"ninjaschooner" <ninjaschooner@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:74C776BF-B285-4C79-A345-E61318C53452@microsoft.com...
> When I tried to install Vista, I had my external hard drive connected to
> the
> computer. It had all of my important files. Unfortunately, both my main
> Hard
> Drive and my External are 250gb, and I accidentally chose the wrong one to
> format. Now, I haven't really done anything else with it and I've seen
> mention of programs that can save your old data even if you've apparently
> formatted as long as you haven't used the space you opened up. Is there
> any
> truth to this, and if so, what would be the best program to use for this?
> This is quite depressing, and I'm in such a state of shock I can't even
> grasp
> the immensity of what I have done, possibly wiping away 4 years and 250gb
> worth of files stored over that time..