Accidentally deleted drive

[potterd]

First of all, I'm an idiot, because I did not backup all my data.

I have two disks, an SDD with windows on it and a 2TB HDD drive with all my photo's etc on it.
Yesterday I decided to reinstall windows on my SDD. I booted up from an USB stick and deleted the whole drive... or so I thought, I accidentally deleted my HDD.

Not a problem per se, I exited windows installation and booted up my computer. This happened one time before and I was able to restore my HDD within 30 mins. Unfortunately, I did not remember which program I used for this, so I googled and came up with minitool power data recovery. I started recoverying, it found my partition and started to recover, until I saw that it had a limit of 1GB(!)

I cancelled the process and here is where my issues begin. No program is able to find my partition anymore.

So now i have a drive with all my stuff on it but I seem to be unable to recover my data. I'm currently running testdisk to try to recover, but I haven't got high hopes.

Does anyone have a solution, I just want my files back. If I try to use a program to recover data I first have to mount my drive again and this includes a format, something I'm not really willing to do at the moment....

 

[Mattios]

Have you tried this? https://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[Janpieter Sollie]

can you from somewhere point out the beginning and end of your partition? if we can already create a new partition with exact the same beginning and end LBA number, you can also search for software that searches for software after quick formatting your hard drive
*edit*: it may be easier than that: if you can find the beginning and end of your partition, you can just create the partition, and the NTFS filesystem may be able to recover from a wrong partition ID

 

[potterd]

Thanks for the tip but Recuva is useless because I have to mount my harddrive before I can use it... which means I have to format it.

I know exactly how large my partition was... do you think it will work if I create a new one with the same size?

 

[Janpieter Sollie]

no, you need the beginning and end point sector of the drive. can this power data recovery tool tell you this?

 

[potterd]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the input. I was not able to get the beginning and the end point out of the free version of the program, the free version was not able to retrieve logs.
Luckily, I own billions of dollars and euro's so I paid $70 for the registered version. I found my partition back and it's recovering right now.

Moral of the story: Do not use minitool to even try to recover anything, no other program was able to find my partition anymore after, and I was forced to 'pay' (hehehe) for the registered version.

This topic can be closed.