How to recover data

[robertson5347]

I have two h-p g56 laptops. One has been giving me problems booting up. In the process of trying to fix it, I went into the wrong recovery program. It started deleting the files and I could not stop it so I turned off the power. After that I can't get past the restore function (no restore points and can't manually set one. I have downloaded several of the freeware data recovery software (Wise, Recura, and one you purchase call Asoftech) to recover some pictures and data that was on the hard drive. Hooked the hard drive to my other laptop by a patch cable. It recognized the hard drive. When I scan the hard drive using the above software, it finds no files. The software claims to be able to recover these lost files.
1. What am I doing wrong?
2. Do I need to reload windows 7 for the software to work?
3. What data recovery software would you recommend?

 

[Nolan Middlemas]

Does it come with a disc? If so you could probably boot it up off of the disk than restore it from there. I had the same thing happen so I just used the disk and restored it from there.