recovering overwritten files? Urgent!

I am an idiot- I only did this because I was really tired.

So I hae two hard drives. I was typing up my final paper for a class and was backing up from one hard drive to the next. I had already done this once. However, I transfered the old version and overwrote the new one

So now 5 pages of writing are gone!

I know if you delete something its recoverable- but am I screwed since I overwrote it?

Help ?!?

There is a chance it's still there, but you need a tool to allow you to recover data that has been deleted, formatted, or fdisked. I do have to admit that the chance is very very slim.

Well, the FBI claims that they can get your old files even when you have written all over them but I don't buy it. In any case, there are probably recovery utils out there somewhere that are certainly worth a try.

Unfortunatly, 3 document recovery programs were unsucessful. Had to pull an all-nighter to rewrite what I wrote.

Next time, Im going to create copies with different names

You can recover stuff that has been deleted, i recovered the entirety of the my documents folder off a formatted harddrive i forgot to backup. But i have no idea if there are programs to under overwriting data

Did you try any of these? My education in computer forensics is just starting, so my knowledge of tool limits is very limited.

MaresWare: http://dmares.com
Accessdata Ultimate Toolkit: http://accessdata.com
http://forensix.org/links might have some more ideas.

It's really cool how those tools work. From what i've read in the past basically a 0 is written to the beginning of the file (instead of the entire file). This makes things faster so to speak. So the PC still has the file it just doesn't think it's there. Something of that nature. So basically you just need a 3rd party utility to undelete that one 0. Norton has an unerase utility. If you've ever used a norton wipe utility thats probably why it takes so long, it has to write 0's to the entire file.