TLDR: tried to remove the assigned drive letter of a system reserve partition on a windows 7 install and wiped out the entire windows partition, which is now a RAW partition, looking for any way to be able to make the disk bootable again and regain the data.
So just last night, I wanted to help my mother make her computer faster by installing Windows 10 on an SSD, as her computer had a hard drive and was running windows 7. During the setup, I messed up and accidentally formatted the system reserve partition of the windows 7 partition on her old drive instead of the new SSD. This made her windows 7 install unbootable. I then went ahead and repaired it by copying boot files from a windows 7 install disk And successfully made the disk bootable again, but under file explorer, the system reserve partition was now visible as a drive with a dedicated drive letter.
Not wanting my mother to get confused and mess up the system reserve partition, I went into disk management and removed the drive letter of the partition in the hopes that it would disappear from windows explorer, but this caused the entire bootable partition of windows 7 with all her data into a RAW partition. (When I boot into windows 10 from the SSD and open disk management, the disk with the windows 7 install has 2 partitions, one healthy system reserve partition of 100MB in FAT32 and another partition with the rest of the drive being RAW. When trying to boot to the disk, I’m greeted with the words “MSDOS” wth some random letters and characters in between the letters (so something along the lines of ?MS?DOS$~) in the top left corner on a black screen. Is there any way to recover the data and make the disk bootable again?
Some things to note:
- System specs: i3-2100, 2GB Ram, 80GB drive (the drive wth the windows 7 partition)
- The drive is SATA setup with IDE and not AHCI, mbr
- I can no longer access the data or even see it when booting from another disk
- The new SSD And Windows 10 install is setup with a gpt efi partition
If anyone knows how I can recover this drive, it would mean the world to my mother and me so we really would appreciate any help!
Thanks