Question I accidentally deleted my old NVMe partition while I was installing windows 10 to my new NVMe

[Najushua]

I accidentally deleted my old NVMe partition while I was installing windows 10 to my new NVMe

Long story short was troubleshooting why I was having issues installing Windows onto my new 4tb NVMe, learned a bit about UEFI vs. Legacy, NTFS vs. FAT32, and MBR vs. GBT.

In the windows installation wizard while I was trying to figure out how to delete the 2 MBR partitions on the 4TB drive in a moment of stupidity I saw a drive with ~1TB and just deleted it. About 30 seconds later I figured I would be able to change the format from MBR to GBT in disk management so that I can actually install windows and went to boot my PC and realized what I had done.

I took the new 4TB drive out, put it in my roomates PC and he formatted it to GBT. Plugged it back into my PC installed windows onto it so I have an operating system now.
I was reading this thread: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...y-mistake-while-installing-windows-7.3721533/

but my extra NVMe looks like this

View: https://i.imgur.com/ROgpSUP.png

View: https://i.imgur.com/QVylaBd.png


It had maybe 20gb free.

I haven't taken any additional steps yet, including the ones in the aforementioned thread. Do you think my data still exists? I find it hard to believe its gone as it took less than a second for it to be "deleted". My last 2.5 years of lawschool work and 4 years of undergrad work, pdf's of textbooks etc are all on there.

 

[zinkles]

It appears the partition has infact been formatted (According to your images), but you still can recover it using software that enables you to do so. Since you have Windows now, you can install one of the tools below.

Some of those tools are (free versions) :

• Recoverit Data Recovery
• TestDisk
• DiskInternals Partition Recovery
• Acronis Recovery Expert Wizard
• MiniTool Partition Recovery

Guide on how to use the tools - most tools are self explanatory, a guide is not needed.

Good luck!

 

[CountMike]

It's almost impossible to retrieve data from an SSD. If trim and garbage collection worked even for a second, data is gone forever. Unlike HDD where data is clustered in large chunks, in SSDs is all over the place.

 

[Najushua]

It appears the partition has infact been formatted (According to your images), but you still can recover it using software that enables you to do so. Since you have Windows now, you can install one of the tools below.

Some of those tools are (free versions) :

• Recoverit Data Recovery
• TestDisk
• DiskInternals Partition Recovery
• Acronis Recovery Expert Wizard
• MiniTool Partition Recovery

Guide on how to use the tools - most tools are self explanatory, a guide is not needed.

Good luck!

I will take a look, I did not format the drive after the deletion. when I booted windows that just how it appeared. Fingers crossed

Update: I presume my file system is NTFS. old C drive was windows 10

I went through DiskInternals first since the GUI was the simplest. wasnt able to recover anything however. trying the other options