He's not still using the computer, is he? Even if there's something that can do this, and I'm not aware of anything, he really has to stop using it to prevent any more overwriting.

This might help, but I'm not sure if it does anything that Recuva can't.

Ideally, you wouldn't even have installed Recuva on his computer, but to another computer and then attached the drive from his PC.


*edit* Sorry to hear about your friend's data loss. It's a terrible feeling to have. That's why getting my clients' files backed up is one of the best feelings I have in my work. It gives ME peace of mind, because as much as I'd like to charge them for data recovery, I'd much rather they not lose irreplaceable files like these.

At this moment I'm running GetDataBack on a partially-fried hard disk that was sitting in an external casing. I don't know what happened to it, but it's pretty messed up, and GDB is taking about 7 hours to look over the disk. I'll be setting this customer up with a backup solution as soon as I can.