depauw

I didn't defrag, so your NTFS management hypothesis sounds likely. I recovered the files (they are thunderbird mail files, so text only), but am getting binary stuff. Recuva got me closer than any other package, but I guess it's no match for the combination of my recklessness and windows weirdness.

I was moving files from an external hard drive to my internal hard drive using cut & paste (foolishness, I know). The internal HD crashed and I lost a lot of stuff. Recuva is an amazing piece of software and was able to find the files I had moved on the external HD, but it is saying that these files have been overwritten by another file. I had however made sure not to write any new data to the external drive and the file that has allegedly overwritten the data in question was put there months ago. So I'm not sure what happened here. I am pretty sure my data is gone forever, since no other tool has even come close to even finding the data, but I was wondering how an older file can overwrite a newer file after the latter was deleted/cut&pasted. Is there anything else I can try.