formatting the drive doesn't really get rid of anything. It just gets rid of the "pointers" or partition markers. It really depends on who they are, and what they use to recover data. If the specific sectors&clusters have been overwritten then it makes recovery harder. I've personally only seen something be recovered after 4 formats but DoD standard is zeroing 7 times & fills w/ random data, and the Air force has an even more rigorous standard. If the drive hasn't been overwritten then the data is still there.