[SOLVED] Rebuild NTFS Partition Table?

[Andrew5]

Hello,
My friend's SSD partition table got completely wiped (except for the EFI partition), and he does not have a backup. I did some diagnostics and ruled out that the SSD is not failing, though I'll keep an eye on it.

I was able to retrieve the files using some recovery tools, but none of the recovery tools were able to "rebuild" the partition table so that I can boot from Windows and use the drive again, despite the files actually being there and the partition being recognized as "RAW" instead of "NTFS".

Is there a way of rebuilding the partition or at least restoring everything to one drive or another without reinstalling drivers and programs again?

It would be a pain to reinstall Windows and the hundreds of programs.

If not, is there a way of automatically backing up everything at regular intervals and being able to restore that backup later on and get everything restored (including programs and drivers, not just documents) as if nothing happened, in one click?

Thanks,
Andrew

 

[USAFRet]

If the tools you've used recovered "some of it"...that is likely all you will get.
100% recovery in the original condition is unlikely.

Time to bite the bullet and reinstall.

For the future, backups to a different drive.
I use Macrium Reflect for this. All my systems and drives are backed up nightly.
Click click 100% recovery. (Yes, I had to do this once after a totally failed SSD)

Some variation of this will work for just about everyone:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

Scale up or down as needed.

 

[popatim]

Can you show us DMDE's partitions window (the Show Partitions checkbox should be ticked)?

DMDE is a free to use tool.

I wont be on the next couple days, hopefully @fzabkar will see this

 

[Andrew5]

 

[fzabkar]

DMDE's full scan doesn't appear to have found much. :-?

Could we see the very first Partitions window (before the scan)?

 

[Andrew5]

https://imgur.com/bd1fL5l

View: https://i.imgur.com/bd1fL5l.png

 

[fzabkar]

There appear to be 3 large unallocated areas which have been wiped. There is no "F" or "B" in the Indicators, which means that there is no boot sector or file system. Normally when you delete or format a partition in an SSD, the OS sends a TRIM command which zeros all the content of that partition. I suspect that is what happened.

BTW, you can capture the screen content using the PrtScn key or the Windows Snip tool. No need for a camera.

 

[Andrew5]

There appear to be 3 large unallocated areas which have been wiped. There is no "F" or "B" in the Indicators, which means that there is no boot sector or file system. Normally when you delete or format a partition in an SSD, the OS sends a TRIM command which zeros all the content of that partition. I suspect that is what happened.

BTW, you can capture the screen content using the PrtScn key or the Windows Snip tool. No need for a camera.

The OS isn't even bootable, so I was running DMDE off of a live WinPE image. Didn't think I could screenshot on WinPE.

At this point, I'll just reinstall Windows and make sure everything is working. My friend told me (thankfully) that there wasn't anything really important on the drive, so I'll just copy what I was able to recover after reinstalling.