I have replaced my 128GB Crucial SSD with a 500GB Samsung Evo and installed Win 7 ulti 64 on it. A (non-boot) Toshiba HDD which was also and is still inside has of course unintentionally also been installed with a bootable Win 7. No real problem, but there were a few movies stored on there which I had forgotten and I suppose there is no way of recovering them?
Chances are not very high. While deleting and formatting usually does not physically destroy data, Windows 7 Setup writes a lot of data back to the HDD. As movies usually are large files (containing lots of clusters), they will be, with a high chance, at least partially overwritten. Additionally, the old MFT or FAT of the drive is gone. Even if you could restore data that wasn't overwritten, you'd have no idea what it belongs to. Maybe data could be recovered on the physical plattern (as cylinder/sector (re)placement is not 100% exact), but it's probably not worth the trouble and money.
Thank you. I did not think it could be possible without extreme effort, but then, sometimes there are miracle solutions for the weirdest problems. so I thought I ask. Loosing three unseen movies certainly is not the world...