Partition recovery - Diskpart issue

Synaphix · 23 Mar 2014

Hi there,

Apologies if this is in the wrong section, feel free to move.

My brother shrinked his laptop drive by 100GB and then made a new partition from that which he backed up data onto in order to format Windows for a fresh install. When installing he did diskpart and used the following commands which wiped out the 100GB Data partition and continued to install Windows without realising this.

- Diskpart
- List Disk
- Select Disk 0
- Clean
- Create Primary Partition
- Format Quick FS=NTFS
- Exit

Which as mentioned he then proceeded to install Windows 7. Is there any chance to recover this lost data as it was pictures of his child and a few videos of him as well as some data files.

Any input is appreciated, thanks!

SIW2 · 23 Mar 2014

You can try partition wizard - partition recovery. Select quick scan. When it finished, tick ALL partitions you want to save, Apply.

Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

whs · 23 Mar 2014

If he had not installed Windows 7, there would have been a chance to recover the data. But as things are, chances are very slim. He can try with Recuva, but in cases where the data had been overwritten, you get mostely corrupted files returned.

What gave him the idea to select disk 0. Was that the disk that was shown in List disk to chose.

Synaphix · 24 Mar 2014

Thank you both very much.

I managed to use MiniTool and left it for 14 hours, it recovered the partition I named 'DATA' and put it back having partitioned the new Windows installation, it then crashed so I had to reinstall Windows again but once done it showed the DATA partition there already.

Thank you!

SIW2 · 24 Mar 2014

You're welcome. Glad it worked for you.

pabuman · 24 Mar 2014

Partition recovery isn't the same as data recovery? Why not data recovery software?