TestDisk not showing partition list, need help!

[Burumii]

Hello!

Today I made a mistake and used Diskpart Clean on the backup drive while re-installing Windows and I have lost all of my files. I have been trying different software from EaseUS to TestDisk to no avail. I have followed and read various forum posts about what I should do with TestDisk, but I have not found an answer to my problems. Windows disk manager shows the entire capacity of the drive as "Unallocated".

So my problem with TestDisk is that when I select the disk, then select "Intel", it lists no partitions. I even tried a deep scan but it still showed nothing. However, when I select "None" it lists me a partition that says "P Unknown". After Analyzing and trying to recover files from it, all that showed up in my recovery folder were random .sfw files with abnormally huge sizes.

(Also the total size of the backup I made was 250Gb, the drive itself is 500/465 Gb. I used to have one smaller partition for mac usage but I deleted everything off it before making my backup).

This is a link to a screenshot of what I see when I select "None": https://puu.sh/H7uJX/0d10da5419.png
I have used various other apps but they also yield no results. To be clear, I used "Clean" on DiskPart, not "Clean all", and I did not make a new volume or partition afterwards. All I did was realize that I had made a mistake and plugged the hard drive in externally to my laptop via USB in order to recover my files.

If anyone could help me I would appreciate it immensely, as I have very important stuff and years of work on certain projects. If you need any more information let me know. Thank you!!

[recuperation]

Hello!

Today I made a mistake and used Diskpart Clean on the backup drive while re-installing Windows and I have lost all of my files. I have been trying different software from EaseUS to TestDisk to no avail. I have followed and read various forum posts about what I should do with TestDisk, but I have not found an answer to my problems. Windows disk manager shows the entire capacity of the drive as "Unallocated".

So my problem with TestDisk is that when I select the disk, then select "Intel", it lists no partitions. I even tried a deep scan but it still showed nothing. However, when I select "None" it lists me a partition that says "P Unknown". After Analyzing and trying to recover files from it, all that showed up in my recovery folder were random .sfw files with abnormally huge sizes.

Have you encrypted your drive? Did you do the partitioning and formating of the drive before using it? You should know if that was INTEL/MBR or GPT style. "None" is most probably not the state your drive had before.

(Also the total size of the backup I made was 250Gb, the drive itself is 500/465 Gb. I used to have one smaller partition for mac usage but I deleted everything off it before making my backup).

This is a link to a screenshot of what I see when I select "None": https://puu.sh/H7uJX/0d10da5419.png
I have used various other apps but they also yield no results. To be clear, I used "Clean" on DiskPart, not "Clean all", and I did not make a new volume or partition afterwards. All I did was realize that I had made a mistake and plugged the hard drive in externally to my laptop via USB in order to recover my files.

If anyone could help me I would appreciate it immensely, as I have very important stuff and years of work on certain projects. If you need any more information let me know. Thank you!!

You can try Photorec. You might post a Testdisk log. There is an attachment tab to upload files. You could upload your screenshot as well to prevent them from disappearing on your net storage sites.

As we are dealing with "very important stuff" and "years of work" you should consider contacting a professional recovery company.

[recuperation]

Hello!

Today I made a mistake and used Diskpart Clean on the backup drive while re-installing Windows and I have lost all of my files. I have been trying different software from EaseUS to TestDisk to no avail. I have followed and read various forum posts about what I should do with TestDisk, but I have not found an answer to my problems. Windows disk manager shows the entire capacity of the drive as "Unallocated".

So my problem with TestDisk is that when I select the disk, then select "Intel", it lists no partitions. I even tried a deep scan but it still showed nothing. However, when I select "None" it lists me a partition that says "P Unknown". After Analyzing and trying to recover files from it, all that showed up in my recovery folder were random .sfw files with abnormally huge sizes.

Have you encrypted your drive? Did you do the partitioning and formating of the drive before using it? You should know if that was INTEL/MBR or GPT style. "None" is most probably not the state your drive had before.

(Also the total size of the backup I made was 250Gb, the drive itself is 500/465 Gb. I used to have one smaller partition for mac usage but I deleted everything off it before making my backup).

This is a link to a screenshot of what I see when I select "None": https://puu.sh/H7uJX/0d10da5419.png
I have used various other apps but they also yield no results. To be clear, I used "Clean" on DiskPart, not "Clean all", and I did not make a new volume or partition afterwards. All I did was realize that I had made a mistake and plugged the hard drive in externally to my laptop via USB in order to recover my files.

If anyone could help me I would appreciate it immensely, as I have very important stuff and years of work on certain projects. If you need any more information let me know. Thank you!!

You can try Photorec. You might post a Testdisk log. There is an attachment tab to upload files. You could upload your screenshot as well to prevent them from disappearing on your net storage sites.

As we are dealing with "very important stuff" and "years of work" you should consider contacting a professional recovery company.

[Burumii]

Sorry for the late reply.

To answer the first questions, I did not encrypt the drive. The drive was working fine until I booted from a Windows Installer USB and did Diskpart Clean. I did not touch the drive at all afterwards and all I did was unplug it from my main PC and plugged it in externally to my laptop via USB.

I was told to use INTEL, but when I select it, it says "No partition is bootable."

What are the differences between Photorec and TestDisk? I initally used Photorec by mistake and ended up in the same place, although I will keep trying to see if anything happened. I have attached the logs I have as of right now, let me know if you want me to do a deep scan and upload the log again. (I did one before, I just didn't log it.)

I have considered contacting a professional recovery company, but I will most likely not be able to afford it.

Also, a couple minutes ago as I was installing windows and since I created partitions using Diskpart on my other drives, for some reason in the Windows installation window it said "Windows cannot be installed in this drive because it has an MBR partition list." However, when I selected the drive I need to recover it only showed unallocated space.

[Burumii]

Short update: I selected GPT and it said “bad GPT partition, invalid signature” twice. Not sure what this means, but I am doing a Quick Search and it's going way slower than the other scans. Hopefully I am on the right track.

[recuperation]

Sorry for the late reply.

To answer the first questions, I did not encrypt the drive. The drive was working fine until I booted from a Windows Installer USB and did Diskpart Clean. I did not touch the drive at all afterwards and all I did was unplug it from my main PC and plugged it in externally to my laptop via USB.

I was told to use INTEL, but when I select it, it says "No partition is bootable."

This is no contradiction.

What are the differences between Photorec and TestDisk?

Read the site, read the manual.

I initally used Photorec by mistake and ended up in the same place, although I will keep trying to see if anything happened. I have attached the logs I have as of right now, let me know if you want me to do a deep scan and upload the log again. (I did one before, I just didn't log it.)

Can't open your attached files, please zip them!

[Burumii]

Sorry, too used to using WinRar. Here you go.

[recuperation]

I can't open your attachment, neither using Win7 nor 7-Zip nor my old version of WinRAR.
Is there a reason for compression being used?
Sorry, I don't want to waste my time trying to open broken files. This is really annoying.

[Burumii]

Sorry for the annoyance! I can't upload them directly because it says "Invalid file extension: testdisk.log"

I have uploaded them here:
Photorec - https://puu.sh/H7DE1/9523398e0d.log
TestDisk - https://puu.sh/H7DE2/2127faf00e.log

I have also uploaded a screenshot of the GPT scan I am performing right now, it will take a while before any results though. I also included the first screenshot.

Again, I apologize for the waste of time, I don't know why it didn't work.

[recuperation]

Use deep search after the quick analysis.