THere is a lot of information on reddit? THey are saying to take it immediately to a data recovery specialist.
http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dat+file+recovery
So one of the guys in the dorms had bought some bitcoins (14) over a year ago when they were ~$7 and recently remembered about them. But a little over a month ago he formatted his hard drive and reinstalled windows. Is there any chance to recover his wallet?
EDIT: Ok so I ran some recovery tools on his computer and we got some wallet.dat files but all of them are corrupted. Any way to fix this?Possible, yes. The data is still there as long as it hasn't been overwritten, but the pointers to the data have been deleted. If you have a friend who is skilled in using a Linux terminal you may want to make an image of the drive and attempt a recovery using Farmer's boot CD. Tell him to using how computer in the meantime if he's serious about this though. He could overwrite the data on the disc (if he hasn't already). This would make recovery almost impossible.
Take it to a data recovery expert ASAP. Turn off the hard drive and don't turn it back on. Every time you do, you're reducing your already low chance of recovering them.
You can try using pywallet on them, there's also this tool which I've never used, so I can't really help. Alternatively there's people who would be willing to take a look at them for you, myself included, but there's no guarantee of recovery even then and handing over your wallet.dat is the same as giving away the keys to spend the coins, so it would require massive amounts of trust. In your place I wouldn't give the files to anyone and would try to recover them myself. Worst case you can sit on the files until some future time when hopefully someone makes a point and click wallet recovery tool, although that could be a year+ from now.
permalinksave
A slim chance. You'll need data recovery tools. I'm no expert though.
permalinksave
On modern HDDs (2001+), one overwrite is enough to make data permanently unrecoverable. At this point it sounds like a forensic recovery would be the only hope, and with the format, Windows install, and 1 month of use, I would say even then the chances are slim to none (as in there is a chance the place might laugh at you for even asking).
permalinksave
I do not believe so. Unless you take it to a data recovery specialist and they tell you otherwise. Your friend may have just made a contribution to the "coins that will never be spent fund"
