Formated/Installed windows on the wrong drive. How to recover from here ?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Arch
Posts: 1
Joined: 26 Jun 2022, 08:02

Formated/Installed windows on the wrong drive. How to recover from here ?

#1 Post by Arch »

Hello,
Basically I wanted to reinstall Windows 10, so I booted on the install drive and started the process .. on the wrong disk. I feel very stupid .. and should have gone to bed instead of doing this wrong manipulation.

It was a data disk with a simple main partition, I realized it very quickly but after the partition process was done (deleting the old one and recreate the windows structure ones)

Right now the disk only has a few MB written on it from a 2To SSD. I tried many recovery tools including PhotoRec but was unable to retrieve much of anything. (But still 3 or 4 files, so data must be here somewhere).

Could this unability to retrieve files be related to and unfortunate TRIM? Could the new partition configuration "hide" the data from the previous one that had maybe a different block structure ? I'm not really versed in the matter.

Any insight on how to proceed? I'm performing a Deep partition search with TestDisk, but I'm not sure it will yield results.

Thank you very much for your feedback, I have very urgent and important information that I'd like to retrieve on this disk.
recuperation
Posts: 3043
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Formated/Installed windows on the wrong drive. How to recover from here ?

#2 Post by recuperation »

Arch wrote: 26 Jun 2022, 08:30 Hello,
Basically I wanted to reinstall Windows 10, so I booted on the install drive and started the process .. on the wrong disk. I feel very stupid .. and should have gone to bed instead of doing this wrong manipulation.

It was a data disk with a simple main partition, I realized it very quickly but after the partition process was done (deleting the old one and recreate the windows structure ones)

Right now the disk only has a few MB written on it from a 2To SSD.
Is your 2 TB SSD the installation target? You are writing "from a 2To SSD" which sounds as if your 2 TB SSD is the source.

I tried many recovery tools including PhotoRec but was unable to retrieve much of anything. (But still 3 or 4 files, so data must be here somewhere).

Could this unability to retrieve files be related to and unfortunate TRIM?
Yes.

Could the new partition configuration "hide" the data from the previous one that had maybe a different block structure ? I'm not really versed in the matter.

Any insight on how to proceed? I'm performing a Deep partition search with TestDisk, but I'm not sure it will yield results.
If your Deep Search does not reveal any partitions that can be explored using the "p"-key ("list files") you would need try other recovery software or consult a professional recovery service.
Thank you very much for your feedback, I have very urgent and important information that I'd like to retrieve on this disk.
For urgent matters you should really consult a professional recovery service. They would even start working for you today (on a Sunday) at an exceptionally high rate, of course.
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