Accidently flashed Windows 10 ISO to hard drive instead of USB

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
Forum rules
When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Locked
Message
Author
sninjax
Posts: 2
Joined: 28 Apr 2022, 12:27

Accidently flashed Windows 10 ISO to hard drive instead of USB

#1 Post by sninjax »

I made the foolish mistake of flashing Windows 10 to my 2 TB hard drive instead of my 16 GB USB using the Microsoft media creation tool. After looking around for a free solution I stumbled across TestDisk, but am very clueless about how to use it. I am unsure what file system the hard drive was before it was formatted, but I would assume either fat32 or NTFS. I couldn't make sense of much of the documentation or responses to similar issues on Google. My level of competence in this field is cleaning a drive using Diskpart, so any advice would have to be pretty step by step :)

Any help would be appreciated !
recuperation
Posts: 3026
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Accidently flashed Windows 10 ISO to hard drive instead of USB

#2 Post by recuperation »

Your harddrive did not have just one partition.

Read here about Testdisk:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

You can cross-read the forum as well.
sninjax
Posts: 2
Joined: 28 Apr 2022, 12:27

Re: Accidently flashed Windows 10 ISO to hard drive instead of USB

#3 Post by sninjax »

Thanks for your reply. Given that the hard drive was in multiple partitions like you said, would that make recovery not feasible/outside the scope of TestDisk? I've tried looking through the wiki you mentioned previously, but I'm unsure if I would be able to use the methods for undeleting files to restore my previous files (unless I'm missing something pretty obvious). If you could point me in the direction of one of the more relevant tutorials I'd really appreciate it. Thanks again for your reply :)
recuperation
Posts: 3026
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Accidently flashed Windows 10 ISO to hard drive instead of USB

#4 Post by recuperation »

Locked