Recovering a formatted, partially overwritten and unallocated partition

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Stephanie
Posts: 3
Joined: 21 May 2021, 11:22

Recovering a formatted, partially overwritten and unallocated partition

#1 Post by Stephanie »

Tech Specs at a glance:
Problematic drive: 1 TB External Seagate Hard drive
Computer operating system: Windows 7
Problem: Was accidentally turned into an ESD-USB bootable media
Drive is in perfect physical condition and less than 5 years old.

Hello
I have a 1 TB Seagate External Seagate Hard drive which was about 55-60% full. I accidentally turned it into an ESD-USB bootable media when I downloaded the god damned Windows media creation tool to it. It went from a 1TB NTFS drive to a 32GB ESD-USB with about 4 GB of files on it. The rest is now an 899GB unallocated drive that can only be seen/shown as "unallocated" in a special partition manager (ie, Window's own Disk Manager, Macrium reflect, MiniTool, EaseUs partition manager) but NOT in Windows file explorer/My computer.

I have already tried data recovery, the results were not ideal since they were raw files with no name no date and no time stamp and has no folder system of any kind. I read that Test Disk can recover partitions and my goal is to try and recover the whole partition with the files in it. I am NOT after yet another form of data recovery, I am really hoping for partition recovery.

Attached is the result of a scan I did in test disk: https://imgur.com/a/iX3r6ME

As you can see, it says "Partition can't be recovered".

Is there anything else I can do to try and recover the partition in tact?

Thank you very much.
Stephanie

recuperation
Posts: 2720
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Recovering a formatted, partially overwritten and unallocated partition

#2 Post by recuperation »

Run deep search.

Stephanie
Posts: 3
Joined: 21 May 2021, 11:22

Re: Recovering a formatted, partially overwritten and unallocated partition

#3 Post by Stephanie »

Thanks for the reply, but how do I continue from the screen in the screenshot? Or, how do I go to deep search?

This is the screen after I select "continue"
https://imgur.com/a/FZr6Utc

Edit: I pressed Q on the keyboard and saw the option for "deeper search and am currently doing that. Will update when I get a result.

Stephanie
Posts: 3
Joined: 21 May 2021, 11:22

Re: Recovering a formatted, partially overwritten and unallocated partition

#4 Post by Stephanie »

DEEP SCAN UPDATE

Hello
This is the result of the deep scan:
https://imgur.com/wdroUaR

and after selecting "continue":
https://imgur.com/ZlURLX4

I see it says "Hard disk seems too small!" but it is a 1TB (1000GB) hard disk, not 2000GB.

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