Accidentally turned External Hard Drive to Recovery Disk

[achmadfourhand]

Hi Everybody

Here is the scenario:

I was trying to remove the pre-installed Windows 8. I figured I should create a backup in case I ever have to go back to the piece of junk software. Anyway, I plugged-in my external hard drive to make the backup...

Here's the **ck up:

It said 'formatting drive'. Within two seconds, I cancelled the operation and removed the hard drive.
Now, when I try to access it (tried on 3 other laptops), it just shows the Hard Drive as Recovery Disk with some 20MB data and total 30 GB space.
Disk management shows 890 GB unallocated space.
It's a seagate 1TB backup drive. There was nearly 500 GB of data on it.

Do I need to use some data recovery program or is there another way. I don't think an entire hard drive can be formatted in 2 seconds.

Can someone please help. I can't stress enough how important the data on the drive is to me.

Regards

Om Arkan

 

[USAFRet]

I can't stress enough how important the data on the drive is to me.

This is specifically what backups are for.

A Partition Recovery tool might work. Maybe.
EaseUS
https://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/index.htm

Minitool
https://www.minitool.com/free-tools/minitool-partitionrecovery.html

TestDisk
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk


You will need a whole other drive (WITH NO CRITICAL DATA ON IT) to possibly recover to.