Boot Drive

[KingAndou]

Hey guys, im new around. I have recently made a boot drive on a hard drive thinking that it will just create a folder for a Boot Drive. Turns out reading more into the forums on toms hardware that it will delete the files I have on the hard drive (right after creating the boot drive on the hard drive). My question is that will I be able to recover the old files? I cannot see the old files that I had and instead of 1TB of storage on the Hard Drive it only shows 31.9gb and renamed to ESD-USB (F:) instead of Samsung (D:). Please help.

[Phentos]

Looks like the main partition may have been nuked and marked as unallocated.

 

To make sure, boot into Windows Recovery mode with the hard drive (should be able to), and open command prompt.

 

Use the following commands:

diskpart

list disk

 

Take a screenshot of the results and attach it here.

 

If you can boot into Windows itself, then open Disk Management (Windows key + X then click) and take a screenshot of the results and attach it here.

[Senzelian]

Depending on what you did, you might be able to get into your drive management and assign the rest of the drive a new drive letter and get your data back.

[KingAndou]

That's what im getting.

[KingAndou]

The storage of my laptop is currently 500gbs because the old one was failing and wouldn't boot so I changed it.

[Phentos]

What does Disk Management say?

[KingAndou]

[KingAndou]

Im stuffed huh?

 

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, KingAndou said:

Im stuffed huh?

 

It says it's unallocated, so you probably won't get it back.

However, you may get some things back, if you didn't completely format it with 0's.

There should be tools to recover deleted files, I think a quick google should provide some good results.

[KingAndou]

Probably means too late, isn't it.

[Willowwizard]

Welp, you've overwrited the drive with a boot disk image.

You won't be able to recover your partitions anymore, you've probably destroyed the old partition table.

 

Luckily, you can try using software like PhotoRec to recover individual files, but the issue is that since the partition table is gone, all the files are just that, *data*, no filename or where it was originally stored. So you're gonna have to sift through potentially gigabytes of data to recover what you need. To make matters worse, anything that's been overwritten by flashing the drive with the boot image is gone, there won't be any way to recover anything that was in the first 32 GBs in the drive. Hopefully that's all just OS data though.