Accidentally re-initialised HDD now its showing as Unallowcated HELP

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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vturbo
Posts: 1
Joined: 11 Dec 2018, 12:32

Accidentally re-initialised HDD now its showing as Unallowcated HELP

#1 Post by vturbo »

Hi all, newbie here, i have an accidentally initialised HDD and now windows 7 is unable to see it, but computer management its showing up as unallocated. There were 4 partitions all with data. i need to clone it to work on it i guess, but Macrium Reflect isnt allowing me to tick it for cloning.

I dont know how to use TESTDISK yet, and need advice please. I think windows tried to boot from an old winxp set up which was still on the first partition on the unallocated HDD, because the normal boot drive's sata lead had come out. Im guessing that the winxp tried to rewrite the MBRs or something when it couldn't boot up due to a different hardware setup.

what do i do to recover the data at least, and ideally can i repair the unallocated hdd so all 4 partitions come back?

thanks

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cgrenier
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Re: Accidentally re-initialised HDD now its showing as Unallowcated HELP

#2 Post by cgrenier »

There is a chapter in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf named "Recovering deleted partition using TestDisk".
If XP reports a wrong disk capacity, boot from a Linux LiveUSB (ie. Fedora), the pdf also described how to create one.

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