DELL Recovery tool deleted my harddisk

[p.schuchardt1024]

Hi,

I have a 5TB external drive with three partitions on it. One 200GB Fat32 (D), one 2TB NTFS Data (E), and one 1TB encrypted NTFS (F). Rest was unallocated.
With my new Dell XPS 15 I tried the use the recovery tool and attempted to make a boot drive from my Win10.drive
The Dell tool displayed all three partition and I selected D in order to turn that 200GB into my boot partition. I clicked start and saw my other 3 partitions disappear on the ext drive. I stopped the process immediately. I realized with horror that the DELL tool formatted the whole disk with all three partitions and deleted its content. One would think if I select D it does not mean D E and F.

I am running EaseUS Data Recovery right now and it found some files, but I have a few questions and maybe my the community can help me out:

1. The recovery tool currently look at a "lost partition" which is E I assume. How would the actual recovery work if there is no windows partition. It shows all as "unallocated".

2. It seems the recovery tool does not see my encrypted file. Any chance here? Are there better tools out there than EaseUS?

3. Should i repartition first and try to recover files later?

Thanks

 

[william p]

You could try booting a Linux Live DVD (don't install Linux just run from DVd). You can look at the HDD files and see what's left. Maybe even copy them to a backup. Dell Recovery tends to mean putting the computer back the way Dell sold it. I would recover every thing you can now. You should have had a backup before borking around with partitions. The data is probably still there. But the address structure for finding it has been erased. I hope someone else has a better solution for you.

 

[marksavio]

first step is to do "partition recovery" before you can recover files.
you can try minitool partition wizard.

 

[p.schuchardt1024]

first step is to do "partition recovery" before you can recover files.
you can try minitool partition wizard.

Thanks. I did run the mini tool and could recover the main data partition. Now I still do not see the encrypted partition. Should I create partitions from the unallocated space and try to run recuva there? Or are there any tools which can recover files from unallocated space?

 

[william p]

You will probably need to be booted into the OS, and have the program you used to encrypt the partition running to view it. If you can't repair the OS partition yet maybe running form a bootable USB, or external hHDD will get it done.