Urgently need OS + data recovery help, made multiple mistakes

Tadgh · October 22, 2018

I currently can't boot into windows, and have somehow removed a partition containing 4TB of backups and un-backed-up files I'm currently working on.

I was planning on reinstalling windows due to system instability caused by corrupted system files. I was going to use the system reset feature but it failed repeatedly and no amount of troubleshooting worked so I decided to create a new partition with some spare space to use as a bootdisk (I didn't have a USB stick or CD), load windows onto that and boot from there.

In the process, without realising it I deleted grub (I dual boot with Elemental). I kinda copped that I had done that and sighed and shook my head but no biggie. The problem being when I was using diskpart I cleaned the volume that I thought was just my partition for installing windows onto but disk unmounted.

Panicked and tired, I then restarted my PC. I was unable to get back up and running with grub rescue, so I took my elemental install media and figured that I'd format C:/, install elemental on one of the few free partitions on my 4TB disk, and continue getting a bootable windows installer ready on another partition in elemental

Only, when I got into elemental it read my 4TB disk as completely empty.

There was absolutely not enough time between me pressing "clean" on that volume and the operation completing/me restarting to format that disk, so I'm convinced the data is retrievable, but I have no idea how and I'm out of my depth and making mistakes. Pllleaaase someone help.

I have been working overtime and trying to balance my degree on top of that and have made some very stupid mistakes in the course of the last 2 hours please forgive me for being an absolute idiot.