Windows installation media formatted over partition

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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cattn
Posts: 2
Joined: 01 Oct 2022, 17:03

Windows installation media formatted over partition

#1 Post by cattn »

Hello, I had 3 partitions on my drive, one was about 1.8TB and had normal files, and backups, another one had windows installation media, and another had macrium media. I cleared out my installation media on that partition (e:), and then used windows installation media installer to install new media to that partition, I'm not sure if I selected the wrong partition (I'm fairly sure I made sure it was right, but who knows) or if the installation media defaulted to the full drive, but now my drive has the installation media on d: instead and that being the only partition on the drive at 32gb. I had over 200gb of files on my main partition (which was d: before). In disk management it says that I have only one 32gb Fat32 partition and the rest is "unallocated". I'm running photorec right now and while it is discovering some things, the majority of it seems to be random txt or dll files that I'm not sure of the origin. as well as tx? and some "others".

Is there anyway to recover the partition? If there's something else I should post please just let me know and I'll try and provide all the info I can

cattn
Posts: 2
Joined: 01 Oct 2022, 17:03

Re: Windows installation media formatted over partition

#2 Post by cattn »

Image

As an update on what it looks like, nothing the "unknown" I'm not fully sure what that means

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

Re: Windows installation media formatted over partition

#3 Post by recuperation »

The line containing the word "unknown" reflects your search scope.
Run Photorec on a system with multiple partitions and pay attention when getting to the screen where you select the scope of your search.
You can select between your partitions which reflect a part of your disk. But when you select the whole disk instead, the source is not a partition anymore. It is a space that can span multiple partitions.

There are two things you can do:
1. You can try out other recovery software.
2. You might consider improving readibility by showing tables directly instead of putting phrases around table entries.

Showing a table like the one below takes me one second to get the picture of the situation. Now compare that table below to what you wrote.
Instead I have to decode the table out of your writing what I won't do. But you don't have to rewrite your posting anymore now.


BEFORE
c: system
d: windows installation media
e:

AFTER
c: whatever1
d: broken
e: whatever

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