Partitioned external HDD and lost all data?

willhub

willhub

willhub

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So I partitioned an external HDD with a 20GB partition to put Windows 10 recovery media on, the issue is, when I booted from it and realised I best do it from inside Windows, when I got back in Windows there was a 32GB FAT32 partition and the rest of the 4TB HDD unallocated?

What on earth has it done???? Have I lost all my backup data?
 
Put the windows 10 recovery media on it? You mean you ran the windows media creator and pointed it to you external drive?

Pretty sure it repartitions the drive so you would need to make another backup of your data.. You did say backup so I assume it's only a duplicate and you don't care about it
 
the 20GB partition on my external drive was NTFS, I did point the media creation tool to that specific drive.

It's not essential but it'd be a a shame if I lost it all, got this software called Mini Tool Partition Wizard, it's been running on a quick search for about 5 hours now and only half way, hope it finds the data.
 
When using the creation tool it does say all data on the drive will be lost.

You may have pointed it to a 20gb partition but it sounds like it’s wiped the drive completely and then done it’s own partitions and left unused space as unallocated.

you will need to run recovery software is there is anything on there that you need to recover. I use a 8gb usb stick purely for this so nothin gets lost.
 
The recovery tool only found the 20GB partition :(

I guess I'll try that Recuva and run it on my laptop as I'm guessing on a 4TB drive it's going to take a day or so on a proper scan to find the data.
 
I used EaseUS recovery, thing is as it's recovering files, they're all mixed up, will it be possible to put everything back together again? Bit like humpty dumpy.
 
mrbell1984 said:
The Microsoft Windows Media Creator is for usb sticks really so you create a boot drive.

Why on earth did you point it to your HDD? :eek:
Click to expand...

I just assumed if I created a partition on my external USB drive it would install on that partition, dunno why it needs the entire drive.
 
mrbell1984 said:
It creates brand new partitions itself by formatting the drive to make it bootable.

Did you get all your data back?
Click to expand...

The software has 6 hours left lol, but it's finding all the data, however so far as I can see, it's not all in order, just files everywhere.
 
Surprisingly it has located full intact folders, all my pictures are still in their folders, even some downloads. They seem to be duplicated over 2 lost partitions though, weird.

However, 3.2TB is unsorted. Oh well, at least camera stuff is recovered and documents are on OneDrive anyway.
 
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