Okay, I did a stupid thing. Bought a used hard drive and went to install win7 on it, and in the process of setting it up I was deleting all the existing partitions, aaaaand I hadn't unplugged my data drive and sure enough, *click, delete* on my existing 2tb drive - then I immediately realized what i'd done so shut down and unplugged it. Stupid stupid stupid.
Fortunately. I have a backup of the really important stuff (photos and such) so even if I can't recover all the data it's not hugely important, but there are ? bunch of things on there that i'd rather recover if I can. At the moment it's showing as unallocated and I haven't done any other operations on it, so I think my chances are as good as they can be, but anyone got any advice? There are a bunch of applications offering partition recovery, but I don't want to fire up some random freeware without any personal recommendations. I have a Linux machine in the house, so I was going to hook it up and try gparted, but reading around there are potential issues with that too.
So anyone been through it, done it for friends or family or know the best program for the job?
EDIT - I've recovered 99% of my data, I tried Testdisk, I tried PhotoRec and neither would work, Testdisk was finding 5 partitions and stating that 3 of them were unrecoverable, only giving me an option of saving or restoring a fraction of my stuff. In the end I bought a new HD to transfer my raw data off and was expecting a nightmare of garbled mush which I'd have to sift through or try to parse to recover filenames and file formats and suchlike, but PhotoRec wouldn't even write to the new drive so in the end I caved and bought a product called GetDataBack, and it worked like a charm, I went with this because the free trial version allows you to look at the data that it can find, then if it finds what you want you can just buy the license and it starts copying. No mess and no restarts, which was a major headache with Testdisk as every time I backed out of committing any changes (which was every time) it needed to rescan the disc, which took HOURS. With GDB it scanned it once (still took a while, but this was a 2TB drive) - the only minor hassle is that it searches by cluster so it finds everything on the disc, including deleted items and duplicates, but it managed to get everything off with almost all of the formatting and folder structures intact, so effectively I just had to delete a few extraneous folders and I was back to exactly where I was before I was so stupid.
Fortunately. I have a backup of the really important stuff (photos and such) so even if I can't recover all the data it's not hugely important, but there are ? bunch of things on there that i'd rather recover if I can. At the moment it's showing as unallocated and I haven't done any other operations on it, so I think my chances are as good as they can be, but anyone got any advice? There are a bunch of applications offering partition recovery, but I don't want to fire up some random freeware without any personal recommendations. I have a Linux machine in the house, so I was going to hook it up and try gparted, but reading around there are potential issues with that too.
So anyone been through it, done it for friends or family or know the best program for the job?
EDIT - I've recovered 99% of my data, I tried Testdisk, I tried PhotoRec and neither would work, Testdisk was finding 5 partitions and stating that 3 of them were unrecoverable, only giving me an option of saving or restoring a fraction of my stuff. In the end I bought a new HD to transfer my raw data off and was expecting a nightmare of garbled mush which I'd have to sift through or try to parse to recover filenames and file formats and suchlike, but PhotoRec wouldn't even write to the new drive so in the end I caved and bought a product called GetDataBack, and it worked like a charm, I went with this because the free trial version allows you to look at the data that it can find, then if it finds what you want you can just buy the license and it starts copying. No mess and no restarts, which was a major headache with Testdisk as every time I backed out of committing any changes (which was every time) it needed to rescan the disc, which took HOURS. With GDB it scanned it once (still took a while, but this was a 2TB drive) - the only minor hassle is that it searches by cluster so it finds everything on the disc, including deleted items and duplicates, but it managed to get everything off with almost all of the formatting and folder structures intact, so effectively I just had to delete a few extraneous folders and I was back to exactly where I was before I was so stupid.
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