Lost photos on laptop hard drive

[numpty]

Can anyone help me by telling me how to retrieve old files from my old laptop's hard drive ?. The graphics card stopped working and whilst trying to fix it I reinstalled windows again. I know my files are there how can I retrieve the old files from the hard drive...cheers

 

[deanj20]

The graphics card stopped working and whilst trying to fix it I reinstalled windows again. I know my files are there how can I retrieve the old files from the hard drive

They may not be there, or recoverable at least. When a file is deleted, it remains in the memory until that memory is overwritten with new data. When Windows formatted the disk for a reinstall, it deleted everything on your HDD. When it began installing, it started writing new data to the HDD, so your old files may very well have been overwritten.

My only suggestion would be to download and install Piriform Recuva and see what you can salvage, if anything. It's an awesome free utility by the same people that make CCleaner. I've used it before with moderate success, but never on a new install trying to recover old data... but what have you got to lose?