Accidentally deleted wrong drive while installing Windows 10

[Stewie2Pac]

Hello Everyone

So I hooked up a good friend of mine with my old rig. We took his old drives (1x 256GB SSD for the OS and 1x 1TB HDD for data) from his old computer and put it in the new one.

We wanted to do a clean install of Windows on the SSD and I accidentally deleted the wrong drive (the HDD) while trying to delete the already existing partitions on the SSD (Here is an example(!) screenshot of the interface I am talking about, and what button I pressed)

After doing this I instantly stopped the installation and disconnected the drive from my PC (after shutting down)

Now, is there any way to get the data back to the state before the accidental deletion? My friend had about 600GB full of data and I really don't want him to lose all that.

[TempestCatto]

https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/

 

I have a paid copy of EaseUS, and man has it come in handy more than a few times. Totally worth it imo.

 

Also a tip, never have anything else plugged in drive wise until AFTER you've installed, fully, your OS.

[Guest]

You can give this a shot (on a separate machine of course): https://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

If that doesn't work, a full recovery software like GetDataBack will have to be used.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

It's a bit more advanced, but I've used TestDisk on a couple occasions.  When I do, first thing I do is make a bit-for-bit clone of the affected disk using Clonezilla (available on Ultimate Boot CD which also has TestDisk).  Then I run TestDisk on the clone.

At least I think that's how I did it, can't remember for sure.  I may have just been able to directly find the lost data on the affected drive, then write to a new physical drive.

 

And, as @TempestCatto said, I make sure, when installing, formatting, recovering, etc, that the ONLY drives I have connected are the ones I'm working with, and leave everything else unplugged.  If I'm doing multiple things/drives, I'll even go so far as to do one at a time, shutting down & unplugging/replugging drives in between.

[Ron1999]

Just restore your backup copy ?

OH! I see ...well unless its deadly important ?? just move on.. hand it back to your friend and pretend everything's all right. easus file recovery and drive recovery is worth a try, too.

[jsho98]

I have no idea if this would work for you situation but I have had good luck with recuva in the past.

[Stewie2Pac]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I ended up buying the full version of EaseUS and it worked perfectly well. It recognized the disk and found all the deleted files. I restored them do another drive then copied the files to the Terabyte HDD. Now everything is back in place.