Restore Partition/Recover Files after Diskpart clean & format

Hi all,

I got myself into a bit of a muck here. While trying to create a bootable USB, I accidentally selected the wrong USB disk (my back up USB disk that contained the manual I was using), & ended up clearing it out. The exact commands I ran are as below:-

Diskpart

Select disk 1 (my bad here, selected the wrong 1)

Clean

Create partition primary

Select partition 1

Active

Format quick fs=ntfs

Assign

Exit

Upon realizing my blunder I've not written any files on the affected disk. Its a WD 1TB, & I've been using it as is for files since day one, I definitely don't recall reformating or partitioning it. All data was contained in the single large partition that the drive came as. Where I am right now, bandwidth is quite limited & unstable, & I'm having a hard time downloading the recovery programs. Any advice on specific programs or utilities that would work best for my scenario? At the moment I'd like to recover the partition, but would be glad id I get back most of my files, that itself would be great!

Thanks in advance for any help.

I've put away the hard disk for now until I get a better idea what works & what does not. I created a dummy disk with the same process to perform any troubleshooting. I found several threads with similar issues, but most of them had only run the "clean" function, whereas in my case I have also run "create partition primary" & "quick format"

Thanks for the tips so far. I've tried Recuva, scanned for around 10 mins and it found quite a few files, although many without their original folder structure. I'd rather try to save the folder structure as well if possible. Still trying to download Partition Wizard (yes even 30MB download is difficult on my current connection)

Hi joestar,

Please see my post here. Relevant in your case. Help! Disk clean and create partition primary recovery

jumanji said:

Hi joestar,

Please see my post here. Relevant in your case. Help! Disk clean and create partition primary recovery

Hi jumanji, thanks for your input although I am just seeing it now after I have (thankfully) recovered my important data.

As you mentioned there, partition recovery was impossible. I ran partition wizard with no luck. I got GetDataBackSimple, tried the trial version & found most of my files & structure intact. I made the plunge & purchased the full version & recovered what I could. I did not fancy trying to many other programs in fear of damaging the existing structure on the hard disk.

All in all, I recovered around 80% of my 1TB HDD. Some data was lost (assuming where the MFT had been over-written). Partition + quick format is indeed a sure fire way to wreck a drive

I am glad that you were able to recover atleast 80% of your data complete with folder structure and filenames using Getdataback Simple, though you did it with your own effort for which I can't take credit for the belated advice on the same lines. ( Your thread is atleast one week old but I happened to see it only yesterday.)

However it validates my advice to the other OP and I hope he also gets into the same boat.:)

For the rest 20% of the data, you can try PhotoRec and check whether you can retrieve atleast part of it albeit without original file names. PhotoRec is absolutely safe as it does not write anything to the disk under recovery and there is absolutely no way you could go wrong and muck it up further( unlike TestDisk which requires skillful handling and a wrong move can prove disastrous).

Thank you for the feedback.