How to recover deleted boot drive

ShadowTech01 · July 12, 2020

Ok guys, I think I messed up here. I was going through some older drives I had and I was wiping them with my Windows 10 install usb. Reason for that is cause it supposedly removes the older OS partitions so I can use the whole capacity. I double checked everything and I was sure that I did not delete my boot drive, but now I can't boot back in and my bios won't let me boot there. I think I somehow screwed my boot drive. Is there any way I can fix my mistake? The drive itself is a NMVe Samsung Evo 970 500gb. I don't think I lost everything but I want to boot back in. Please help!

Electronics Wizardy · July 12, 2020

You got backups?

What does the partition table look like on that drive.

Make a image of that drive with something like ddrescue first

4 minutes ago, ShadowTech01 said:

e older OS partitions so I can use the whole capacity.

This really isn't a thing, just format whne you need to use it.

Kisai · July 12, 2020

5 minutes ago, ShadowTech01 said:

Ok guys, I think I messed up here. I was going through some older drives I had and I was wiping them with my Windows 10 install usb. Reason for that is cause it supposedly removes the older OS partitions so I can use the whole capacity. I double checked everything and I was sure that I did not delete my boot drive, but now I can't boot back in and my bios won't let me boot there. I think I somehow screwed my boot drive. Is there any way I can fix my mistake? The drive itself is a NMVe Samsung Evo 970 500gb. I don't think I lost everything but I want to boot back in. Please help!

SOL. SSD's, especially when TRIM is enabled are just gone.

And also "been there" once, I one erased the flash drive I used, instead of the hard drive on a system, and that's why you have to pay attention if something is booting in UEFI mode or legacy, because if the OS was installed UEFI and you booted as legacy, it won't show the drive, which makes it easy to accidentally erase the flash drive you booted from.

Anyway, no, I don't think you're going to be able to recover anything from a SSD. You could try but if you told it to erase the partition table, it's likely gone.

On the other hand, if you only erased the EFI partition and the rest of the data is still there, you might be able to just unplug that drive, reinstall windows to another drive, then plug that drive back in and recover the data from the main partition.

But that's assuming you actually deleted just the EFI partition and not the entire drive. If you deleted the entire drive, it may have just told the drive to do a secure erase, and 0'd the drive instantly.

ShadowTech01 · July 12, 2020

I've looked back in and this is what I see...

I do have another ssd I can install windows to and try to get some stuff back. I really want to try to get the old one back though cause I don't want to redownload/install everything. Thankfully I kept the important stuff on a seperate drive.

ShadowTech01 · July 12, 2020

41 minutes ago, BlueScope819 said:

So you accidentally selected your boot drive with the installer and deleted one of the partitions? You can see what you did because it should say drive 0, drive 1, drive 2, and so on. Assuming that it's drive 0, if you see any unallocated space under drive 0 you deleted one of the partitions on it. There is no way that you can fully recover from that, and most of your files should still be there. Install windows on a hard drive and just use windows explorer to try and go into the partitions and copy files off of them, as long as you didn't delete your main partition. If you did, you are sadly screwed, you may be lucky to get a few files back with a file recovery tool.

I'll give it a shot...