No OS found. C:\ drive became RAW

You are doing a good job. You are also right in not "Apply" ing anything when not found right.

Now I presume that you only ran a Quick Scan with Partition Recovery Wizard. Run a Full Scan which may take quite sometime to complete and post a screenshot of the partitions shown. Let us see whether it can dig out the right partitions. Again do not APPLY. Let me see the screenshot. After the screenshot cancel and close PW. If need be it can be run later.

For the present you may continue to run Partition Wizard from the same source from which you have been running it.

If the screenshot does not look good, then you may need to create the bootable pendrive with the latest version downloaded from the link I had already given..

The image you see is the result from a full scan. There is another disc on my computer. Should I run a full scan on that disc as well?

What do you mean by another disk in your computer?

Your laptop drive is the one which has gone RAW and you have run the Partition Recovery Wizard on that drive. Right?

Here is what it looks like from partition wizard

Disc 1 seems to be the problem

I must admit I just do not understand the screenshot you have put out.

I do know that there are/were some motherboards with a small SSD built in to speed up booting etc., and also there are hybrid HDDs with a small solid state memory builtin.

So could it be your laptop has some unusual features?

I think it would be best to talk to Lenovo Support and get to know what they say.

Even the second drive does not look alright though it shows a large 400GB+ partition.At one point after running Lucid Puppy you said you were able to see the files but could not copy those as those showed as Read only. On which drive was it?

Of course running bootable Lucid Puppy or Partition Wizard is not going to make any changes.

So at this stage I would advise you to create a PW bootable pendrive, boot from it ,run it and show how the drive appears in it. Just the first screen as soon as you run Partition Wizard. You can then discuss what you see with Lenovo Support.

I am unable to mount disk 1 in lucid puppy. The other disk mounts fine.

The screen shot is from the Bootable partition wizard as it works now.

The problem disk is disk 1 with the negative usage space. When I explore, I can see the names of the files I wish to recover. I find it interesting partition wizard shows the 29gig allocation as ntfs but windows sees it as raw. Does any of this help? Should I try photorec?

OK, you are now running Partitiion Wizard from the bootable pen drive and it shows two drives.

Well as I said it is possible that your laptop has two drives one small SSD to boot and also be a temporary memory to which the files you are working upon will be copied and worked upon by the PC and another the usual main HDD.

If my assumption is correct then all your data should be there in in the HDD with the 400GB+ partition in Disk 2. The files you report as having seen in Disk 1 may be only a few files that were copied to it.

But the disquieting point is that some program seems to have written a wrong partition table already into it. There is an 8GB Unallocated partition and a 3MB Boot and to that extent I would believe that the main 400GB+ partition is truncated and lost its NTFS Boot record to become unallocated..That couldn't have happened on its own.

In any case you can run a Full Scan on it. Let us see what all existing and lost/deleted partitions are shown. Post a snapshot. Just highlight the partitions shown and double click on them. Do you see all or most files?
( Do not put tick marks in the square box. Just cancel and quit PW. Let me examine the screenshot and then give instructions.)

As for PhotoRec , it is safe to run as it does not write anything to the drive, but the files recovered would have lost their folders and folder structure. What you will get is a bunch of files renamed. If its OK for you you can try.

But if files are seen in Partition Recovery Wizard, there is a good chance - I can't say sure- those can be recovered with their original folder structure and names by TestDisk but it requires careful handling and a little bit difficult to work with.

By the way, what is the nature of data you want to recover? ( IMO. there is no possibility of restoring your PC back to original working condition without a complete reinstall. I have to call upon gregrocker to check on it by examining the present mauled disk/s structure.)

Ok I will post the results of the full scan on disk 2 when I am home. I had it run during the day already, so I can post the screenshot when I am home.

At this point, all I care about is recovering the photos in the drive. I have a newborn child and never got a chance to backup the photos I took unfortunately. So I am hoping to get back as many photos/videos as I can. The file structure or filenames for that matter do not matter as I can re-organize later.

Thanks!

Here is the result of a full scan of disk 2.

Double clicking the first item, I see a system volume information and recycler folder

Item 2 partition explorer see attached

Item 3 has no files

Item 4 see attached

Item 5 has a system volume information folder

I do not see the contents I want to retrieve in this disk

I do not see any light. The major 400GB+ is not seen anywhere.

Just post a screenshot of how your disks appear in Partition Wizard now.. (like the one you posted in your post#14). Its just for the record and not going to resolve the issue.

While on it, just select the major 400GB+ partition in it and see whether in the Left Pane under Operations you can see Copy Partition as shown in the screenshot below.We shall keep this as the next option if PhotoRec fails to give any desired result.( That Copy partition should not be greyed out if you have to do it.)



Now go ahead and run PhotoRec.

Go to the Topic Recovery: in the guide here Guide to using PhotoRec recovery software. to familiarize yourself with PhotoRec.
(Skip what is stated above that topic Recovery: which just describes what I did to lose the photos to perform the recovery. You have already lost the photos and do the Recovery now)

Note: On Sunday the 17th, I am flying back to India. So tomorrow and day after I will be busy and there may be a break. I may still peep in tomorrow night but thereafter only after I reach India on 19th. if PhotoRec fails do the Partition Copy. Have an empty formatted 500GB drive connected before you boot into Partition Wizard. Good luck.