WDC 2TB - Attempted to reinstall windows. Recovery

[WindowsIntelGuy]

Ok so long story short and straight to the point.
Started with windows not booting.

• 1. This harddrive was just a data storage originally, the SSD I had windows on was needing to be repaired not sure about the problem as it was a few months back.
  
  2. Attempted to split partition and/or use a third harddrive for a temporary windows, not entirely certain. I ran into a problem where I had to change gpt to mbr or vice versa anyhow I was unaware that it'd wipe data.
  
  Have 3 internals: My Original Windows 10 copy 130gb ssd, the 2tb WDC with my lost data A New 2TB NVMe Drive.
  
  3. Data was lost so I formatted. Accepting the fact that they were lost. I believe the hardrive was ExFat though I formatted to NTFS. Not sure how I'd done it.
  
  4. Read somewhere that there STILL MAY be some chance that the data may be obtainable. Now trying to recovery original file system. As I did not use the drive after installing windows. Windows 10 would work momentarily maybe 10 or 15 mins at a time and it would blue screen of death. WINDOWS HAS ENCOUNTERED A CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR. Believe I tried repairing the windows with a boot disk Rufus USB. Stull did the same thing.

So I suppose my question now would be did I foul up the data to the point of being unrecoverable or may there be some chance that few, most games can be recovered.

Been using TestDisk, I know now unfortunately, that there was a boot sector problem because I'm running into it now using Testdisk.

I'm sure readers will want my log file. I'm not sure where to find it. Think I can't find the partition if I do quicksearch but I'm pretty sure it shows up with deepsearch. I have no idea what to look for and reading other posts with my sector errors bring up case to case basis' where the log file is needed to see the extent of the problem or the steps to recover.

Sorry for the book I am trying my best to give what info I have don't know which order to go about recovering the partition >run testdisk> Intel> blah > blah... or where to get the log file. I started with Intel then I seen a post where one of ya'll scolded him and told him to use GPT lol so now I'm at 50% or so..

Thanks. Will up date when I'm able to get this log file.
Hoping someone here could gimme a step-by-step to share my Log.

[recuperation]

I am not aware of any game signatures in PhotoRec, you can check here:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Fo ... y_PhotoRec

I guess PhotoRec will not be able to help you!

The TestDisk log file is located in the TestDisk folder, by the way.

If you installed a Windows operating system over an EXFAT partition the important metadata of the EXFAT partition will be overwritten.

Please use a commercial recovery tool to try out if any remains of the old file system can be found.

[WindowsIntelGuy]

It's odd because there is remnants of the files still present on drive like partial of system files. Zip files.. I'm surprised you guys are so responsive do you sleep? Lol it may not have been ExFat.. I might be confusing booting USB drives.

It is indeed NTFS.

Like I said I don't remember what steps I'd used as it was was few months back. There's the original file system from before including my download folder. Within a Windows.old file though its not the entirety of the HDD. It's only 40gbs being used. Think i had used closer to 1.3 tbs.