Data Recovery after Diskpart cleaned and created new partition

gregrocker said:

....Rest assured you are in the best possible hands with Jumanji.

Not infallible though as greg seems to imply :). We are also learning from user experiences and our mistakes and becoming wiser by the day .

Anyway @MycroftHolmes, thank you for your inputs in posts #5 and 9.

I agree totally with your idea of cloning the drive and making the data recovery effort on the cloned drive.

What software are you going to use to clone the drive? ddrescue???

After cloning run the Partition Recovery Wizard in Partition Wizard as indicated earlier and check whether it can pull out the lost/deleted partitions.

(Running a Quick Scan / Full Scan on the current drive also will in no way affect your data as long as you do not give a write command by cancelling and closing the PW after posting the Found Partitions Window.)

Things would have been simpler if you had immediately after partitioning ( the UDF and the encrypted partitions) saved the GPT data in Sectors 0 (the protective MBR), 1 (the GPT header), 2 (the GPT Partition Table ), LBA n ( the last sector - the GPT header backup) and n-32 ( backup of GPT Partition table)

And as Greg said all data which is your bread and butter should have not just one but two backups.( I know you lost the only backup)

Keep us posted.

jumanji said:

gregrocker said:

....Rest assured you are in the best possible hands with Jumanji.

Not infallible though as greg seems to imply :). We are also learning from user experiences and our mistakes and becoming wiser by the day .

Anyway @MycroftHolmes, thank you for your inputs in posts #5 and 9.

I agree totally with your idea of cloning the drive and making the data recovery effort on the cloned drive.

What software are you going to use to clone the drive? ddrescue???

After cloning run the Partition Recovery Wizard in Partition Wizard as indicated earlier and check whether it can pull out the lost/deleted partitions.

(Running a Quick Scan / Full Scan on the current drive also will in no way affect your data as long as you do not give a write command by cancelling and closing the PW after posting the Found Partitions Window.)

Things would have been simpler if you had immediately after partitioning ( the UDF and the encrypted partitions) saved the GPT data in Sectors 0 (the protective MBR), 1 (the GPT header), 2 (the GPT Partition Table ), LBA n ( the last sector - the GPT header backup) and n-32 ( backup of GPT Partition table)

And as Greg said all data which is your bread and butter should have not just one but two backups.( I know you lost the only backup)

Keep us posted.

Well, Sir, I cloned the hard drive using WinHex. And then I saved the Veracrypt Partition using WinHex to a file. Actually VeraCrypt (or even Truecrypt) doesnot have a header,rather the header is encrypted. Hence normal data recovery softwares could not detech it. I saved the sectors of the Veracrypt Partition manually, by selected the sectors, and then using Copy Block (to a File) in WinHex. I could then mount the file using Veracrypt. The data, thankfully, is intact, save one 1GB file. Thankfully I have other backup of that file. It was an illuminating experience for me.

So finally you got everything done with your own efforts. Well done. If in future less knowledgeable folks come out with similar problems, we know whom to call :). So hang around.

I just have one doubt. What is that UDF partition, why did you create it and what data is in there??

jumanji said:

So finally you got everything done with your own efforts. Well done. If in future less knowledgeable folks come out with similar problems, we know whom to call :). So hang around.

Sure. I've tasted the despair of losing data, and will help anyone to alleviate it in future.

jumanji said:

I just have one doubt. What is that UDF partition, why did you create it and what data is in there??

That UDF Partition contained Portable versions of TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt, and the keyfile, so that I could mount it in systems which does not have the keyfile, or TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt installed. I made it UDF as it was better suited for a mere 50MB partition than NTFS. UDF is actually like the successor of FAT32. I'd never trust it to make my principal file system though, as it's not as robust as NTFS.

OK, again well done. And one rep goes here.

This definitely requires familiarity with Sector Editors and knowledge of how a particular encryption works.( which I lacked )

Here is an expert who can get into sector level copying and accomplish things where lesser mortals would have given up.

You may mark this thread as solved and that may help others looking for a solution in similar conditions.

jumanji said:

OK, again well done. And one rep goes here.

This definitely requires familiarity with Sector Editors and knowledge of how a particular encryption works.( which I lacked )

Here is an expert who can get into sector level copying and accomplish things where lesser mortals would have given up.

You may mark this thread as solved and that may help others looking for a solution in similar conditions.

Thank you. You're too kind. Actually, luck was on my side as the hard disk was factory-fresh and was zero-filled. This made finding the starting sector of the partition easier.

Hello,

sorry for bringing up this post after several years now, but I'm having the same troubles, and it seems @MycroftHolmes found the solution for this. I'd appreciate if you can assist me further.
In my case, diskpart clean (not clean all) was applied to the wrong disk, partition got removed, and now appears as unallocated space.
No further partition was created or formatted afterwards.
On the drive I had an unencrypted partition and another Veracrypt encrypted one.
The files outside the encrypted area already were recovered successfully, but now I'm stuck finding the right sectors on Winhex to get it loaded successfully into Veracrypt.
A .dd image was done of the drive, and trying to work with the image file to not touch the HDD that much.
@MycroftHolmes, if you're still around, please hit me up, or somebody who could take a look into this.
Thanks!

Dalomi said:

Hello,

sorry for bringing up this post after several years now, but I'm having the same troubles, and it seems @MycroftHolmes found the solution for this. I'd appreciate if you can assist me further.
In my case, diskpart clean (not clean all) was applied to the wrong disk, partition got removed, and now appears as unallocated space.
No further partition was created or formatted afterwards.
On the drive I had an unencrypted partition and another Veracrypt encrypted one.
The files outside the encrypted area already were recovered successfully, but now I'm stuck finding the right sectors on Winhex to get it loaded successfully into Veracrypt.
A .dd image was done of the drive, and trying to work with the image file to not touch the HDD that much.
@MycroftHolmes, if you're still around, please hit me up, or somebody who could take a look into this.
Thanks!

Thankfully, there are tools that exist now that makes recovery a lot easier. I will suggest you take a look at DMDE or R-Studio data recovery solutions. You can also check r/DataRecovery sub on Reddit for expert advice. But DMDE is perfect for recovering your partition.

Hey thanks for getting back that quick! Yes I also tried with DMDE already, as the easiest way would be just to restore the lost partitions, but I'm a bit lost on the scan results of partitions/tables, and not sure which one has to be restored. You can see here how it looks after the last scan:
464f8a46-738e-4941-825d-68a85b93f701 hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB
2d4e169f-1a71-4e21-853d-8b810e01acc5 hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB

It's a 2TB disk, which I think was divided to leave around 500GB on the encrypted partition.