Went through to Windows 7 installation, deleted wrong HDD volume..

Twisted13 · 15 Jun 2012

I had all my files saved on the secondary Western Digital 160GB Sata HDD, it was listed first at the time... But I accidentally deleted the volume on it..

Is there a way to get those files back? I had photos, movies, music, some other important files. The whole reason for having them on that secondary drive was to save them (kicking myself), until I installed Windows 7 on the new 500GB Sata HDD... I got a copy of Paragon Partition Manager 11 Personal ... and going through the Undelete Partition wizard now... Any help? Suggestions? Thanks in advance! :)

PS. I just did the "delete" option in the Windows 7 installation section for "advanced options", the HDDs were there.. but I accidentally hit delete on the 160GB instead... That's all I did with the drive though.

bassfisher6522 · 15 Jun 2012

To try and answer your question; yes and no. You can take the drive and try to have it professionally recovered. There are some companies out there that specifically recover data from these types of situations. This can be very expensive and no guarantee. I know this not what you wanted to here.

I have 3 hdd in my system and have made notations as to the location of each drive and how the OS see's each of them...ie 0 is hard drive 1, 1 is hard drive 2 and 2 is hard drive 3, which is the way I have mine installed in the hdd cage...I know that hdd 0 is the 1TB drive and hdd 1 and 2 are 320 GB for backups and data storage. Keeping in mind each drive letter that the OS assigns to each of them. So when a re-install of the OS comes along I know what hdd is what and where.

Twisted13 · 15 Jun 2012

Hey, thanks for reply.. :) yeah, I asked for help over on Bleepingcomputer.com too, and the one guy said to use TestDisk... then I tried TestDisk + PhotoRec.. and im getting my files back now..

Going to take like an hour and half, and the files are scattered in various "recoup" folders.. but at least I'm getting the data back!

Yay!

After it's done, I'd like to figure out how to compile the hard drive back proper.. in hopes of maybe having the structure of everything the way it was again...

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic457032.html
http://html5.litten.com/windows-file...with-testdisk/

TVeblen · 15 Jun 2012

Another program that works well and many people here like is RECUVA.
But you've started already, so stick with it.

And people (everyone):

Disconnect all extra hard drives before starting an OS installation.
Back up your data!

OldMX · 15 Jun 2012

As stated above, unplug all non essentials disk before an operating system install, i've seen all kind of tragedies that could be avoided this way.

Duzzy · 15 Jun 2012

If you have only deleted the volume and not formatted like you say then you should be able to use Testdisk to restore the partition table in a couple of minutes. Although it's not easy if you don't understand what your looking at but you can check out TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity

The problem with PhotoRec is no folder structure, the files don't have the original names and it will also recover files that have been deleted from the drive by you when it was working. You could end up with thousands of unnecessary files. Recuva would probably be better for this type of recovery if you can not repair the Partition table with Testdisk.exe.

EDIT: That link you posted could also help - » Windows