Recovering reformatted partitions?

[SimonC]

I've got Windows 7, I was going to restore from an image to another drive. Never having done this, I thought best to disconnect the original hdd with the windows installation on.
I had partitioned the second drive and that had the image on, and that was the drive I also wanted to restore the image to.
So it found the image and listed a drive, so went ahead and started, then realised that my external hdd was plugged in, so stopped the procces.
Plugged my ext hdd into laptop and it was trying to restore the image to that, or do something, I'm not sure. All I know is my data has been deleted and now have 3 partitions. I do have a backup of it all, but can I get the ext drive back to how it was?

 

[bledd]

If you have a backup of it all, just restore the backup

Once you've started writing to a drive with partitions that you've just removed; the chance of 100% recovery is very low.


If all you'd done was click 'remove partitions', then that would be recoverable with TestDisk.

I'd just remove all the partitions from the drive, then restore your data.

 

[SimonC]

I download a few different programs, I let one run that took an hour and a half, it found some of the files, but the few that I restored which were videos didn't work.
So am restoring as you said, I formatted the drive so I have one partition and have started again.

Lesson learnt, although what windows was trying to do to the external drive??