The title basically says it all. I have a 1tb external hard drive with a single partition. The larger side of the partition is where I keep a lot of different stuff, including almost all the photos I've taken over the last five years. Anyway, I recently built a new rig, and I needed a large enough USB device to use Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. Like an idiot, I for some reason thought that when it needed to format the drive, it would only format the smaller half of the partition (about 32gb) and use that as the new boot drive while keeping the data on my other partition intact. I was wrong, and now Disk Manager shows the larger (more important) partition as an unallocated empty drive. Is there any hope of recovering that data or is it doomed? I just wanted to ask before wasting a pro's time.
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Windows 10 Media Creation Tool Format, Lost All Data On Partitioned Hard Drive
- Thread starter turtle329
- Start date
Solution
Someone Somewhere
Titan
- Sep 23, 2012
- 22,291
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If the space is unallocated, rather than having been overwritten with a new partition and contents, it's pretty likely to be easily recoverable. No guarantees, but worth a try.
Have a read through our list of data recovery tools and see if anything works before sending it to a professional: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
Have a read through our list of data recovery tools and see if anything works before sending it to a professional: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
Hi
the media creator install probably destroyed any data at the begining of the disk though not all 32GB
You need an other usb hard drive, or a internal hard drive or network shared drive to save the recovered data on to.
If you try to recover data from the raw drive to its original location you risk making the data un-recoverable even by an expert.
You can try several data recovery programs and see which one works best.
I would start with Piriform Recuva and cgsecurity.org Photorec(overy)
small files like photo's can generally be recovered but large files like videos are more difficult to recover completely (if fragmented)
you may find some files loose their original file names
regards
Mike Barnes
the media creator install probably destroyed any data at the begining of the disk though not all 32GB
You need an other usb hard drive, or a internal hard drive or network shared drive to save the recovered data on to.
If you try to recover data from the raw drive to its original location you risk making the data un-recoverable even by an expert.
You can try several data recovery programs and see which one works best.
I would start with Piriform Recuva and cgsecurity.org Photorec(overy)
small files like photo's can generally be recovered but large files like videos are more difficult to recover completely (if fragmented)
you may find some files loose their original file names
regards
Mike Barnes
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