Data recovery advice needed, I made many mistakes

[TadghsMuffins]

currently can't boot into windows, and have somehow removed a partition containing 4TB of backups and un-backed-up files I'm currently working on.

I was planning on reinstalling windows due to system instability caused by corrupted system files. I was going to use the system reset feature but it failed repeatedly and no amount of troubleshooting worked so I decided to create a new partition with some spare space to use as a bootdisk (I didn't have a USB stick or CD), load windows onto that and boot from there.

In the process, without realising it I deleted grub (I dual boot with Elemental). I kinda copped that I had done that and sighed and shook my head but no biggie. The problem being when I was using diskpart I cleaned the volume that I thought was just my partition for installing windows onto but disk unmounted.


Panicked and tired, I then restarted my PC. I was unable to get back up and running with grub rescue, so I took my elemental install media and figured that I'd format C:/, install elemental on one of the few free partitions on my 4TB disk, and continue getting a bootable windows installer ready on another partition in elemental


Only, when I got into elemental it read my 4TB disk as completely empty.


There was absolutely not enough time between me pressing "clean" on that volume and the operation completing/me restarting to format that disk, so I'm convinced the data is retrievable, but I have no idea how and I'm out of my depth and making mistakes.

Any help greatly appreciated,

Thanks,
Tadgh.

 

[hang-the-9]

A clean is pretty much instant, it does not format the disk but it wipes all partition info.

Need some info here about the actual physical disk setup. You said you formatted C:, is that 4TB partition on the same disk as the C partition? This is all one one disk? When you did a clean command you had to select a disk, that selects the full disk. Need some more details about the disk configuration and what you "cleaned" and formatted. You did creating partitions, formatting stuff, clean command, bit messy to sort out exactly what was done to what.

You can stick the disk as a secondary in another system and run the testdisk utility against it to see if it picks anything up. I was able to recover files several times with that utility after a drive lost it's formatting and became RAW.

If you really don't want to lose the files, you may want to just bring it to a data recovery place and have them try. Will cost you, but at least they are a lot less likely to do things that would make it even more expensive to recover the files. As long as the disk is not damaged it should not be a totally crazy amount to recover stuff.

Besides you said you deleted backups, that would mean you have the originals correct? A backup is not a backup if it's the only copy you have.

 

[velocityg4]

Definitely don’t try to install anything on it. Each write means data is destroyed.

As stated before you will need to place it in another computer. You can do the same computer but you will need a separate boot drive. You will also need a recovery drive. This drive must be at least 4TB preferably larger. For most recovery software the recovery drive must have enough free space to encompass the entire drive data is recovered from.

As for software I like Nucleus Kernel. As it works with a raw drive (no partitions). Just get the appropriate version ( FAT, NTFS, HFS, &c) for the file system your drive used. There might be better options now. I stopped accepting recovery jobs several years ago.

Be prepared. You will get a lot of crap files (corrupted, blank, deleted, system, &c). You may also lose directory structure. So, you could be pouring through a lot of auto generated folders full of random files to find your data.

 

[TadghsMuffins]

A clean is pretty much instant, it does not format the disk but it wipes all partition info.

Need some info here about the actual physical disk setup. You said you formatted C:, is that 4TB partition on the same disk as the C partition? This is all one one disk? When you did a clean command you had to select a disk, that selects the full disk. Need some more details about the disk configuration and what you "cleaned" and formatted. You did creating partitions, formatting stuff, clean command, bit messy to sort out exactly what was done to what.

You can stick the disk as a secondary in another system and run the testdisk utility against it to see if it picks anything up. I was able to recover files several times with that utility after a drive lost it's formatting and became RAW.

If you really don't want to lose the files, you may want to just bring it to a data recovery place and have them try. Will cost you, but at least they are a lot less likely to do things that would make it even more expensive to recover the files. As long as the disk is not damaged it should not be a totally crazy amount to recover stuff.

Besides you said you deleted backups, that would mean you have the originals correct? A backup is not a backup if it's the only copy you have.

Hi! Thanks for responding.

My drives are set up as follows:

128GB SSD (windows boot drive)
2TB HDD (storage only)
4TB HDD (storage, GRUB, and Elementary OS)

The drive that got cleaned was the 4TB HDD, which is why I'm unable to boot into an OS right now. It was cleaned as I was attempting to clean an individual partition I had made on that disk.

In the process of trying to reinstall windows, I was going to install elementary back on the 128GB SSD, so that's also been formatted. There is now no Windows installed on my PC

I've got a friend coming to bring me W8.1 install media as we speak, I also found an old SATA disk drive which I plan to install it with, back on the 128GB SSD.

I am considering bringing the cleaned 4TB drive to a data recovery place, although first I'm going to get windows back up and run something like Recuva to try and recover what I can...

Some of the files I can retrieve from other locations which they were backed up from, but others are unique to this drive :/

 

[TadghsMuffins]

Definitely don’t try to install anything on it. Each write means data is destroyed.

As stated before you will need to place it in another computer. You can do the same computer but you will need a separate boot drive. You will also need a recovery drive. This drive must be at least 4TB preferably larger. For most recovery software the recovery drive must have enough free space to encompass the entire drive data is recovered from.

As for software I like Nucleus Kernel. As it works with a raw drive (no partitions). Just get the appropriate version ( FAT, NTFS, HFS, &c) for the file system your drive used. There might be better options now. I stopped accepting recovery jobs several years ago.

Be prepared. You will get a lot of crap files (corrupted, blank, deleted, system, &c). You may also lose directory structure. So, you could be pouring through a lot of auto generated folders full of random files to find your data.

Thanks Velocity, I appreciate the heads up.

I actually hadn't thought, in my ignorance, that I'd need another drive to write the data back onto. That being said, I don't mind purchasing one given the situation.

Really appreciate you and Hang's showing up with clear heads, as I'm sure you can tell I'm might frazzled right now.

Thanks again,
Tadgh

 

[Alabalcho]

I would offer painful but more secure way:
- get another 4tb drive, and make an image (byte-by-byte) copy of the corrupted one. 'dd' ran from Elemental is a straightforward way, with proper parameters, and precautions. This way you can afford to try several options;
- run TestDisk off your Elemental (Linux). There're good chances it will be able to recover partitions and volumes;
- Once you're done - get an external enclosure, put that 4TB drive there, and use it to make regular backups.

 

[TadghsMuffins]

I would offer painful but more secure way:
- get another 4tb drive, and make an image (byte-by-byte) copy of the corrupted one. 'dd' ran from Elemental is a straightforward way, with proper parameters, and precautions. This way you can afford to try several options;
- run TestDisk off your Elemental (Linux). There're good chances it will be able to recover partitions and volumes;
- Once you're done - get an external enclosure, put that 4TB drive there, and use it to make regular backups.

Hi Alabalcho,

This is definitely going to me my path going forward. Thank you for the affirmation and your insight.

Tadgh