[SOLVED] Restore unknown WinDirStat

[ajcke]

Using WinDirStat I have 800GB of "Unknown" space that I need to restore. All items are greyed out when I right click this Unknown item in WinDirStat. I've tried running it as admin and standard user. This drive is not the OS drive. It's a user data drive.

This drive and "Unknown" contains all user data. The typical user directories are mapped to this drive. Recently disconnected all drives to clean a different drive. When I formatted this drive I accidentally gave it the same drive letter as the user data drive. User directories display in file explorer but are all empty.

Any suggestions?

 

[rgd1101]

When I formatted this drive I accidentally gave it the same drive letter as the user data drive.

so you formatted the drive?

 

[USAFRet]

Using WinDirStat I have 800GB of "Unknown" space that I need to restore. All items are greyed out when I right click this Unknown item in WinDirStat. I've tried running it as admin and standard user. This drive is not the OS drive. It's a user data drive.

This drive and "Unknown" contains all user data. The typical user directories are mapped to this drive. Recently disconnected all drives to clean a different drive. When I formatted this drive I accidentally gave it the same drive letter as the user data drive. User directories display in file explorer but are all empty.

Any suggestions?

Please show us a screencap of this WinDirStat window.

Also, your Disk Management window.

 

[ajcke]

so you formatted the drive?

My apologies for not being clear.
Drive E: Data Drive (user files)
Drive H: Backup Drive (formatted). I had to use the sata cable from drive E temporarily to copy the contents of the old backup drive to the new back up drive. I gave the new backup drive the letter E instead of H or another letter. Once the letters were corrected and the cables were back on the correct drives the user signed in. The user desktop, docs, etc folders were over written with new folders. The old data is now in an Unknown that I can't access.

 

[ajcke]

Using WinDirStat I have 800GB of "Unknown" space that I need to restore. All items are greyed out when I right click this Unknown item in WinDirStat. I've tried running it as admin and standard user. This drive is not the OS drive. It's a user data drive.

This drive and "Unknown" contains all user data. The typical user directories are mapped to this drive. Recently disconnected all drives to clean a different drive. When I formatted this drive I accidentally gave it the same drive letter as the user data drive. User directories display in file explorer but are all empty.

Any suggestions?

Please show us a screencap of this WinDirStat window.

Also, your Disk Management window.

 

[USAFRet]

So it seems you accidentally formatted the drive with your user folders.

Before doing this, did you copy that data elsewhere ?

 

[ajcke]

So it seems you accidentally formatted the drive with your user folders.

Before doing this, did you copy that data elsewhere ?

Unfortunately no. That was the end goal with the new drive. Can that GB of unknown space be retrieved with a product or with a Linux OS?

 

[MWink64]

Unfortunately no. That was the end goal with the new drive. Can that GB of unknown space be retrieved with a product or with a Linux OS?

I'm not quite sure I'm following what happened but the fact that it's showing 800GB of "unknown" data makes me think the drive may not have been formatted. Considering the drive contained user data, I'm wondering if it could be a permissions issue. I would suggest booting to a live Linux session (from a flash drive) and seeing what you can find from there. Last I heard, Linux does not respect NTFS permissions, so that would rule out that possibility. I know at least Linux Mint (Cinnamon) has a program called something like Disk Usage Analyzer, which works much like WinDirStat. It may be able to poke through directories that Windows wouldn't normally allow. It's a long shot but may be worth a try. If that doesn't yield results, you could try file recovery software. If it's a hard drive and as long as it wasn't overwritten, the data may still be recoverable. If it's an SSD and was formatted by Windows, recovery is far less likely.

 

[ajcke]

Linux Mint (Cinnamon) has a program called something like Disk Usage Analyzer

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave this a try but Disk Usage Analyzer could not see the missing files. I purchased R-Studio for $60 and restored the files.