I recently had a problem and purchased the PC Doctor disk to try to recover lost data on a hard disk but to no avail. Operating XP SP2.

At the beginning, I don't know exactly what happened but avast downloaded an update then many non operational files (all exe), stored on both hard disks, were moved to the avast chest. I panicked and restarted the computer (wrong I know now) but upon restarting all of the files had been deleted from the chest and the disk they were stored on. My external disk now appears as not formatted and therefore I cannot gain access to the files stored on that disk. When I order the PC Doctor disk it was because it was represented that any hard disk could be repaired and data recovered but I do not find programs which repair hard disks nor does the recovery program recover the data on the external hard disk.

Can someone help me to find a way to recover the data on the external hard disk? And if anyone knows why this happened or how this happened please explain.

Thank you in advance for your help and consideration.