I recently used an emachine recovery cd to re-install WinXP. I first backed up all photos to another hard drive. When I ran the recovery disk, not only did it wipe the primary hard drive, but it wiped the backup hard drive too! I took it to a repair shop and had them run a recovery program on it. All it recovered is what looked like old IE cache pics. Is there anyway to recover the pics on the backup drive? They were important. Thanks in advance.

If you look at the size of the harddrive and how much space is used - does it appear that all your data should be there? If so try taking ownership of the drive and see if you can access your files then.

If not then you will have to purchase a good recovery program. I would recommend R-Studio. It's powerful and doesn't have a huge price tag to go with it and it can recover data off a formatted hard drive. You can download the demo and then purchase a license if it is able to find your files.

Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows