Data Recovery

Delicroix

December 3, 2012 9:32:28 PM

I am coming here after burning myself out on every possible route I could try.

Several months ago, I was making a flash-drive bootable so that I could install an OS on my friend's Netbook.
I popped open diskpart and started going to work; however, I made a critical mistake at the beginning without realizing it.
On the disklist section, I accidentally selected my media drive instead of the flash-drive.
I continued with the process, formatting the drive and making it a bootable without realizing that I wiped all of my videos, movies, music, and pictures.

I have spent many months trolling around the internet, searching for a working program. Having tried every piece of recovery software in Hiren's Boot CD, multiple no-name products from CNET, and gobs of other apps from Google searching... I am at my wit's end.

All of these programs come up with mostly nothing, I have had one or two programs that could find the named partition "Media." I have had a few that recovered some strange log files with a date around 2007 on them. I assume this is because of the HDD being out of an old system; it used to have Vista on it, but I reformatted it for my new rig.
After making this mistake, I did not write any data to the drive. I believe one of the recovery programs gave it a new file system, but it has since been wiped back to unallocated space.

I understand that a lot of you will likely direct me to programs I have tried before, but I am mostly hoping for insight or maybe some sort of awesome method. Or if I am completely SOL, I would like to know that as well... I am unsure as to what sort of repercussions there are to making a disk bootable.

Thanks,
Tanner Miller

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t53186

December 3, 2012 9:54:27 PM

If you attempt to use a disk defragger like Auslogics can it find either a master file table or system volume information? assuming the disk is NTFS formatted.

Was it NTFS formatted? What new file system did the recovery program give it and what did it revert to when it "wiped back to unallocated space"?

With the info you have provided recovery sounds pretty slim.

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Delicroix

December 4, 2012 12:13:07 AM

t53186 said:

If you attempt to use a disk defragger like Auslogics can it find either a master file table or system volume information? assuming the disk is NTFS formatted.

Was it NTFS formatted? What new file system did the recovery program give it and what did it revert to when it "wiped back to unallocated space"?

With the info you have provided recovery sounds pretty slim.

It was NTFS when it still had my data. I think the program put it into NTFS again but now it is just a blank slate. No file system, no formatting at all (for this reason, defragmentation is not possible.)

Here is a shot of the current Properties of the disk:

I can of course format to NTFS if you think that it would help in partition/file discovery.
I suppose I am just going on the hope of a quote from my professor, "There is almost ALWAYS a way to get the data back, just depends how hard you are willing to try."

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Delicroix

December 4, 2012 9:10:11 PM

Quote:

Have you overwritten the original data?
As long as you have not overwritten it, you can use a free recovery program to help you.
Actually, I have tried to recover my videos, movies, music, pictures and other files from my drive. It always works. So, you should try it.
Note:
1. Stop using this drive immediately to avoid overwriting the original data, which is a nightmare to your lost data.
2. Save your recovered files on a different storage device in case of recovery failure.
3. Always back up you data in the future.

No, I have not written any data to the drive since the initial formatting. I haven't tried that program yet, but I will give it a shot, I suppose.

I am still curious as to whether or not I should format the disk with NTFS again before I try anymore recovery, though.