3 Harddrives were randomly set to Allocated - Data Gone?!?

[Matt_liil]

I logged on to my PC today and found that all the disks that are connected via sata 3 cables to my motherboard are now unallocated. This includes one 1TB 850 Evo and two 2TB WD Blues. I did not get any Windows updates last night, as far as I can see. I have tried putting the drives in another PC, and they show as unallocated. I am unsure what could have possibly caused this, and very scared that all the stuff stored on these drives may be lost. I have run the Seagate bootable tool and found my drives are fine. The drives had no issues being detected by Windows or in BIOS. I am aware there are 3rd party recovery tools, and would love suggestions on ones people have had real success with; although I would prefer to stay away from 3rd party apps if I can fix it without them. Does anyone have some suggestions?

[Archer42]

Everything depends on how important the data is.

What I'd do is boot into some linux live cd (clonezilla is good, because being a specialized tool for working with disks it has all the tools you might need), image the drives (will need something big enough to fit the images, but then we return to the question how important the data is) and then try recovering partition table using testdisk.

Also in general if data is important do not write anything to disks or run any tools without making images first. You can make matters much worse by doing that.

 

And you also should try looking for root cause, because that might be a malware for example, or some software/hardware fault you need to fix to avoid it happening again. Such stuff does not just happen "randomly", something caused it...

[Matt_liil]

15 hours ago, Archer42 said:

Everything depends on how important the data is.

What I'd do is boot into some linux live cd (clonezilla is good, because being a specialized tool for working with disks it has all the tools you might need), image the drives (will need something big enough to fit the images, but then we return to the question how important the data is) and then try recovering partition table using testdisk.

Also in general if data is important do not write anything to disks or run any tools without making images first. You can make matters much worse by doing that.

 

And you also should try looking for root cause, because that might be a malware for example, or some software/hardware fault you need to fix to avoid it happening again. Such stuff does not just happen "randomly", something caused it...

I will try and use clonezilla to image the drives today, thanks. I did try using Recuva (said the drive wasn't in a format it could understand) and Disk Drill (Only suggested 150gbs of the 1TB SSD could be recovered). I am only testing things on the SSD as almost all of that was games, the two WD drives have been removed until I figure out a solution.

 

I agree that there must be some weird root cause, I just couldn't understand why or how. I basically swapped out all of my components recently (new MB, GPU, CPU, RAM). Who knows?