If you’re not familiar with the process known as double deletion you may be in for a huge surprise when attempting to recover deleted files on a computer that has suffered a crashed hard drive. The normal procedure when one’s Windows based computer has refused to start up due to a logic failure is to simply reload your version of the Windows operating system. This will almost always allow your computer to once again start showing the familiar Windows welcome screen. But in 90% of the cases people reload Windows forgetting that the process of reinstalling the operating system also reformats the hard disk drive of that computer.
Reformatting the hard disk drive amounts to the process of deleting all stored files on that drive. This in itself is not too much of a problem as most quality file recovery tools are designed to be able to undelete files removed due to reformatting a drive. But when one attempts to restore files that have been deleted by reformatting the computer hard drive the task to recover files becomes twice as difficult. Only the absolutely most powerful data recovery tools are capable of scanning a reformatted drive and locating previously deleted files on that drive.