I have a machine with two hard drives - one 20 gig system drive and
one 200 gig data drive.
I decided it was time to reinstall the OS (XP) and moved any data
files on the system drive to the data drive.
I formatted the system drive and reinstalled XP - everything went fine.
Brought the machine up, installed the chipset driver (supermicro
xdal5-g motherboard).
Restarted the machine.  Windows says it wants to chkdsk the data drive
(F:).  It starts deleting orphaned files - thousands of them.
When chkdsk finally finished and XP came back up, I discovered that I
was missing thousands of files on my data drive.  Whole folders of
documents are now gone - gigabytes of data.  I should have had a
backup, I know.
Does anyone have any suggestions for recovering the data?

There are a variety of data recovery programs out there, just do a
search for "recovery" on download.com and several with free trials
will come up. I would recommend VirtualLab Data Recovery 4.0, though I
have not used it personally it saved my friend's butt. Or there's the
more traditional (but typically more expensive though you may luck
out) route of calling up computer shops that can do data recovery.

And if ever you wander into Mac there's Data Rescue X.

Hi,
Use this freeware tool to recover your data. I have used this tool
realy helped me a lot on a critical time.
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html
Hope you will safely get back your data.

Shiva