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My dad's Windows 10 Lenovo laptop had been quite slow since the beginning, I don't know due to what. The software in it was installed by some other person, so we don't exactly know what the issue was. Today I decided to give it a fresh install of Windows 10. I succeeded, but at the cost of accidentally deleting 4 partitions with 6 months worth of my dad's work. The laptop has only 1 HDD, and it would not let me install Windows on the C drive because the HDD was in MBR format. I thought using the clean command would fix that, but I was careless enough to not note that it would delete ALL the partitions. And so, for half a day I spent running different stuff on testdisk, referring to other forum discussions on what to do, and here I am myself finally because I just couldn't retrieve even a TRACE of the 4 lost partitions. I ran quick and deep searches multiple times, from both Intel partition mode AND EFI/GPT partition mode, and all of them resulted in the same results:

a. 1 Partition cannot be retrieved
b. 5 lost partitions were found, 3 of them were old windows installs (C drives), 1 was an EFI partition and the other one, the filesystem was broken, as said by testdisk.

I also ran testdisk from an Ubuntu live usb, it gave slightly different results, there were a lot of partitions but were very small, less than 3MB, and about 3 broken file system ones, and the usual old windows ones. None of them ever had a trace of my dad's documents. 6 months of work just poof. Several gigabytes.

I don't think I can spend more time fixing it because he wouldn't let me, but I'd love to know if there's anything else I could try :') Thanks

If you examined each partition found after running deep search and listing the content of the partitions did not yield the expected information, you are left with Photorec, other commercial recovery software or a professional recovery service.