Update: Hats off to Comp USA who recovered all the images (and some more from ages back) from a Mini SD card.

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Last night, the desktop computer crashed hard. We're pretty good about backing up stuff but we haven't done a back up since last week. So, all of our Christmas photos were on there, including my boy's first Christmas. We want the pictures back.

After it crashed, I kept trying to reboot and googled up the error message. The solution from Microsoft was the same as it always is and they said to reinstall windows. I did. However, in the reinstall, it kept getting to a point where it said something like unable to create file system32 and it kicked out of reinstall. I went to Comp USA and grabbed a USB external HD case. Put the hard drive in it to see if it could be read and it could. However, all that is there is the Windows directory. It's all gone.

So, first, when did reinstalling windows format a hard drive? Second, can I get my stuff back?

Update: Also, the data was on our flash card but was deleted. Is that a better route?