Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Karavusk
Posts: 4
Joined: 10 Jun 2018, 17:48

Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

#1 Post by Karavusk »

This happened to my 500gb nvme SSD in my laptop. I originally used it for a triple boot hackintosh (100gb OS X, 100gb Ubuntu and around 300gb Windows) but ended up deleting Ubuntu and OS X after a while.
I still had the partitions but I never really cared because I had a ton of free space and windows wouldn't easily let me make the windows partition bigger (without using diskpart) so I just ignored it.
Well a few days ago my laptop didn't turn on because it couldn't find my SSD for some reason. Happened before and it went away by itself. Plugged that SSD into my PC and all the data was still there. After that
I took a look at the partitions and saw that I still had the other 100gb partitions on that SSD so I wanted to add that all to my windows partition while I am at it. Did exactly that but Windows wanted to change the
SSD to dynamic first. I have no idea what that is so I just said yes and ended up with 3 partitions with the same drive letter for some reason. Worked fine in the explorer but it seemed kinda strange and I wanted
to just get rid of it again and do it properly with other tools (like diskpart and not the windows build in thing). I tried to delete one of the 100gb partitions but that ended up deleting all 3. So I stupidly just created a new
ntfs partition for the whole drive (all done with windows quick partition stuff) and realized my mistake.

Pretty much no recovery software that I could find worked... ended up deleting the partition again and converting the SSD back to basic with currently no partition on it. Tried a bunch of recovery tools again but nothing worked...
There is nothing that important on that but I would still like to access it. Does anyone know exactly what I have to do? I can't imagine the data being gone since I never overwrote anything so the data should still be there.

Thanks for the help.

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cgrenier
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Re: Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

#2 Post by cgrenier »

You can try to recover your old partition using testdisk, analyse, quick search, stop, deeper search...
If it find your old partition, use 'p' to list its files, if it works, set the partition as P(rimary) and on next screen, choose write, confirm, Quit and restart your computer.
If it doesn't work, use PhotoRec. Be careful to store the recovered files on another partition.

Karavusk
Posts: 4
Joined: 10 Jun 2018, 17:48

Re: Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

#3 Post by Karavusk »

cgrenier wrote: 11 Jun 2018, 05:59 You can try to recover your old partition using testdisk, analyse, quick search, stop, deeper search...
If it find your old partition, use 'p' to list its files, if it works, set the partition as P(rimary) and on next screen, choose write, confirm, Quit and restart your computer.
If it doesn't work, use PhotoRec. Be careful to store the recovered files on another partition.
Even with the deeper search I never found my partition, only damaged ones where it couldn't read the data. I am trying out photorec now. Lets hope it find more than my EFI partition files but I highly doubt that.
I have no idea why this is even that hard without ever overwriting files on the SSD.

Karavusk
Posts: 4
Joined: 10 Jun 2018, 17:48

Re: Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

#4 Post by Karavusk »

cgrenier wrote: 11 Jun 2018, 05:59 If it doesn't work, use PhotoRec. Be careful to store the recovered files on another partition.
Just tried it twice.... nope only found EFI partition files. Any other ideas?

Karavusk
Posts: 4
Joined: 10 Jun 2018, 17:48

Re: Accidentally deleted partition and I can't restore it

#5 Post by Karavusk »

Ok I give up... time for a fresh windows install. Spend more time trying to fix this than it would take to redo a few things that got deleted.

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