had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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dominic427
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Aug 2020, 16:31

had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

#1 Post by dominic427 »

I'm lost at this point. so i wanted to dual boot Windows 10 and steam os as i wanted steam os to try and get more frames in a fps game (stupid ik) but when i installed steam os it wouldn't boot into steam os and instead the screen would flicker during the boot. so I tried using a win 10 flash drive to boot into windows but the hard drive was unreadable or un-fixable etc. Since i have another computer (desktop, win 10) i removed my hard drive from my laptop and put it into my desktop and tried to use Teskdisk to fix the partition or filesystem so i could at least get my files back. i know i can get everything back from photorec but i really would like to be able to boot back into windows.
here's what i know
i tried to install this version of steam os 3 times, each created a 10gb (partition?) Now my drive only had ~15 or 20 gb free so obviously something was overwritten
my hard drive is 1tb
and when i used test disk to list partitions i find (the ms data is something i did, which could have been wrong so sorry i probably should have done more research before doing anything)

Disk /dev/sdb - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
>P MS Data 2048 999423 997376 [NO NAME]
P Linux filesys. data 999424 21000191 20000768
P Linux filesys. data 21000192 41000959 20000768
P Linux Swap 41000960 61001711 20000752
P Linux filesys. data 61001728 1953523711 1892521984

i can post my logs too but there might be a few missing.
the MS DATA one also worked as a efi fat32, which was recognized by windows but only included

is there any way i could recover my old files with their original directories? (ie C:/user/domin/pictures/(files here) ) or even make it bootable again?

Any help would be much appreciated

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

Re: had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

#2 Post by recuperation »

Run Testdisk use deep search after analyse and use the "p" key to look into each partition to see if Testdisk lists the files you would expect or need to recover. If that fails use Photorec.

dominic427
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Aug 2020, 16:31

Re: had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

#3 Post by dominic427 »

ill use deep search again but last time i used it there were ~50-80 different things to chose from. But even so, is there no possibility to get it to boot into windows again/is my only option photo rec?

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

Re: had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

#4 Post by recuperation »

dominic427 wrote: 25 Aug 2020, 21:47 ill use deep search again but last time i used it there were ~50-80 different things to chose from. But even so, is there no possibility to get it to boot into windows again/is my only option photo rec?
If 50 to 80 partitions aren't worth looking in you would need to reinstall Windows 10 correctly to have a bootable system.
Photorec does not repair drives it only serves to recover files.

As the German saying goes: "Wash my coat but don't make me wet."

dominic427
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Aug 2020, 16:31

Re: had windows 10 pc, tried to dual boot steam os, ruined hard drive.

#5 Post by dominic427 »

Thanks for the help, i decided just to use photorec and limit it to video and image files so i can recover anything memorable i then ill reinstall windows and start fresh. I even made a python script to sort the files by file type for me once its done recovering all of them :D

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