[SOLVED] I wiped my drive...help recover!!

Dsa44

Distinguished
Dec 6, 2011
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18,510
Major brain freeze and my error here! I have a Seagate Freeagent USB backup drive which had lots of backup stuff on it. I was getting ready to upgrade to Win10, and the media creation tool gave me the option to save the files to a usb drive.

Well you see where this is going.... I thought I could use my Freeagent USB to add the win10 install files to it for later usage. It did NOT warn me that it is going to WIPE the drive and create a bootable USB Win10 install media!!!!

So now I have the Freeagent drive with none of my backup files.

What would be the best way or tool to use to try to unformat and recover my backups and such? Preferably an open source, easy to use software, I have heard of Recuva.
I've been beating myself up over this .....
Thx
 
Solution
It did NOT warn me that it is going to WIPE the drive and create a bootable USB Win10 install media!!!!
The Windows media creation tool will warn you many times, you must have ignored them.

Your best option is to try software recovery and recover those files to a different drive!

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Yes it did warn you. Twice.
Once at the webpage where you downloaded the MediaCreation tool, and then again when you selected the desired drive and just before you clicked OK.

Recuva or similar will NOT recover 100% of your previous data.
Some of it has actually been overwritten. Gone gone gone.
 

Dsa44

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Dec 6, 2011
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After I calmed down a bit, I guess I'm not too worried, I have other backups on a raid NAS and online, just wanted to know for sure if there was anything major-league different on this Freeagent.
 

falcon291

Honorable
Jul 17, 2019
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13,290
After I calmed down a bit, I guess I'm not too worried, I have other backups on a raid NAS and online, just wanted to know for sure if there was anything major-league different on this Freeagent.
We cannot say anything for sure. But the problem with your Harddisk, is most critical parts were already written. And any software would find some files yes, but it would take you not minutes, not hours, but probably days to figure out, what these files were. If you have backups use them, working on saved files may help you, but as you already have some backups, I don't recommend to try to save them.
 
I gotta agree what a headache if you were to try to recover files. But if there pictures you need to recover use diskdigger. I have saved so many familes pictures that the last one that came acrostic my bench was a husband who lost his wife and there last pictures were on a deleted hard drive.