Question Recovering Old Partition

[Szyrs]

Hi, so I'm having an issue with one of my hard drives, I think due to a hot swap.
After spending a fair while reorganising and deleting files in windows 10 I rebooted my pc and wandered off. When I returned, windows was correcting errors on my hard drive before loading the os. When it finally loaded, the partition on my hard drive was renamed (to the same name of a partition I have on another drive) and 3/4 of a full hard drive was empty.

I've used recovery software to recover a lot of the data - but while it has recovered most of the folders, the files are mostly renamed to garbage and ordered by file type.

In the past I've recovered RAW partitions using chkdsk or something like that, I was wondering if anyone knows how I could just do something like that, return in to the state it was in before windows trashed it? I'd really appreciate some help because a lot of it is course work. Thanks for your time...

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Blaming windows for trashing your hard drive is pretty ridiculous. Your hard drive probably failed was what it sounds like

Get a new hard drive and restore your data from a back up. That’s how you fix this problem. It’s doubtful any recovery program will be able to get anything back and I doubt you’re going to want to spend tons of money on a recovery company but that may be your only option

 

[Szyrs]

It's a 3 month old hard drive, right on the outside edge for manufacturing defects but waaaay inside the expected lifespan. Besides, failing drives don't tend to rename partitions to other dictionary words as they fail... Windows is configured to automatically rebuild partition tables of hard drives in your system that it decides it doesn't like, despite it having no effect on the booting of your machine. That may be a feature that some people want but as a default, it is pretty ridiculous. A caution note might be a bit less catastrophic...

As stated, recovery software has recovered the data, although it's mostly unusable as it has been renamed in alphanumeric code and the files have been separated from the folder structure.

Thanks for your advice about purchasing a new drive and loading it from backup, or spending tons of money on a data recovery lab - it neither solves my problem nor answers my question though. I sincerely hope you don't get many flat tyres irl...

 

[USAFRet]

Hot swap - Was the drive in a write state when you unplugged it? What did you do to prevent that possibility?

Dead drive - Hey, it happens. I've had a drive die at 5 weeks out of the box.

Recovery software - That should be the second last thing you try, right before $$ in a data recovery service.
Prevention, recover from your automated scheduled back...then consider recovery tools like TestDisk, Minitool partition recovery, Recuva, and others.

And the current consumer level recovery tools rarely recover 'all of it', in a 100% usable state.