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Recover "backup" partition on pc with formatted windows 7

Tags:
  • Data Recovery
  • Windows 7
  • Partition
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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August 7, 2014 3:31:11 PM

Hello!

I made a huge mistake a few hours ago.
What I wanted to do was reinstall Win 7 Professional on my laptop. It's split in two partitions with the first one having the Win 7 installation and the second with important, personal files such as pictures, music etc.
I made a bootable USB with Win 7 Prof. ready and booted it. When it told me there was an error because it couldn't create a partition, I researched the issue to find out that the harddrive shouldn't be partitioned... So I formatted the one with Win 7, and it still showed the error (obviously). Now, my laptop can't boot because of no OS installation, therefore no boot.mgr! I really want to recover the content in the other partition, which I hope you can help me with.
After a reboot, when I try to install Win 7 from the USB, it now only shows one disk which says (translated from my mother language), "unallocated space on disk 0". I have an external hard drive that I want to copy the contents from the aforementioned partition to but if there is only drive... I'm really starting to panic here :( 

Thank you!

More about : recover backup partition formatted windows

a b G Storage
August 7, 2014 4:32:25 PM

You have several options to choose from:

1. Attach the drive to an external enclosure and connect to another computer via USB, then attempt to peruse.
2. Boot with a bootable DVD of Linux or some other distro, mount the drive and attempt to view the contents.
3. Download some free recovery software (there are plenty out there i.e. http://www.piriform.com/recuva) and run that on the other computer with the HDD attached via USB.

Hope this helps.
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August 7, 2014 7:51:16 PM

Plunge this drive to computer with an external enclosure and check whether it works well there. If it works well there, copy out all your files there and change another drive enclosure. But, if files could not be easily copied for some errors or problems, just take chances with some drive recovery software (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258623-32-anyway-reco...).
But, if the drive cannot be read on your computer, try it on another computer with different USB cables. Or directly consult some experts for help.
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August 8, 2014 12:22:22 PM

Hello again,
First of all, thanks a ton for your quick replies! Now for the update. I hope you have had the time to read the 3 extra lines I added at the bottom, elmo2006. I'm sorry for not writing *UPDATE* with bold text above it to make it stand out.
I followed your second option and made a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu, followed a thread to install testdisk and started it. I went ahead and chose partition type, intel, and ran an analyze - the quick one. After a while, it found a partition with about 250 GB - this is my hard drive as a whole with the unallocated space (hopefully my backup partition).
Following that thread, I set the partition as P for primary and wrote it to the partition table. Now, I'm stopped dead at this screen: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22353078/Billede%20...
I am very hesistant as to what to do next, however, as I don't want to write anything to my hard drive in case my files get overwritten. I hope you or someone else can help me further in this.
SusanChen, I had the exact same idea with connecting my hard drive to another computer with a USB-to-SATA cable. But I thought, if this works, then I can save some money. :-)

Thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1...
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a b G Storage
August 9, 2014 9:39:34 AM

fabervae said:
Hello again,
First of all, thanks a ton for your quick replies! Now for the update. I hope you have had the time to read the 3 extra lines I added at the bottom, elmo2006. I'm sorry for not writing *UPDATE* with bold text above it to make it stand out.
I followed your second option and made a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu, followed a thread to install testdisk and started it. I went ahead and chose partition type, intel, and ran an analyze - the quick one. After a while, it found a partition with about 250 GB - this is my hard drive as a whole with the unallocated space (hopefully my backup partition).
Following that thread, I set the partition as P for primary and wrote it to the partition table. Now, I'm stopped dead at this screen: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22353078/Billede%20...
I am very hesistant as to what to do next, however, as I don't want to write anything to my hard drive in case my files get overwritten. I hope you or someone else can help me further in this.
SusanChen, I had the exact same idea with connecting my hard drive to another computer with a USB-to-SATA cable. But I thought, if this works, then I can save some money. :-)

Thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1...


Ok, I'm not sure as to why you ran *testdisk* but lets try this again. Restart using the bootable Ubuntu image and then once Ubuntu is up and running try to mount the drive in question and if successful, then you should be able to view the contents of the drive(s) where possible. If you are unable to mount the drive then your next recourse would be to mount the HDD in question in another desktop and attempt to recover the files via software i.e. recuva. If unsuccessful, then you may need to send it in for analysis however this is not cheap and will cost you.
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August 29, 2014 5:36:40 PM

First of all, I apologize for the long delay between the last post and my status update. A LOT of stuff came up which had me prioritize some things over this. Now if I remember correctly...
Mounting the drive was out of the question - I couldn't even access it normally, and it didn't even have a drive letter anymore. As I noted in my first post, the space was unallocated and therefore not accessible by normal means.
I tried to use testdisk to gain access to the unallocated space with no luck, so I will not post my steps. Instead, I will list the steps I took to actually solve the problem.
1. Get an external drive with PLENTY of space. It should have enough space to cover for the total size of your hard drive. In other words, you will save the recovered files in it.
2. In Ubuntu/Linux, install photorec and run it.
2a. If you haven't hooked up your external drive yet... do it now. Note the drive letter down.
3. Follow this guide, http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/recoverdeletedfiles..., if you haven't used photorec before.
3a. For the love of god, it's super important to choose your external drive as the location where photorec stores the recovered files. Don't store them on C: / the hard drive or you will most likely overwrite a lot of the lost data. If you can't (I couldn't at first because of read-only attribute or something like that), then don't start the process!
4. If you have time (at least 2 days), load up the external drive on another computer and find your files. You will probably have .ini, .manifest, .config etc. files as photorec basically recovers everything that has not been rewritten.

As I had by an accident "half-formatted" the whole hard disk (ie. including the other partition) through Ubuntu, I wasn't able to recover the files I wanted. Out of 91.000+ files, I knew a few hundred of them but none of them were what I was really looking for. Fortunately, most of it was synced in the cloud.
Lesson to be learnt: Backup everything, no matter how trained you are, when performing a potentially dangerous action such as formatting.

Thank you for the help (it did point me in the right direction), elmo and Susan!
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