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Hard drive appears wiped after installing Windows 7 to another drive
Hey all, somehow my 1TB hard drive was wiped out and I've lost 930GB worth of files from the past 8 years. I don't have any backups (stupid me). My hard drive contains lots of family vacation photos and videos, old school projects I'll need in the future, and loads of other really important stuff. Here's what happened.
-This hard drive (lets call it Drive A) was Truecrypt encrypted. It contains all of my files.
- I had to send back my SSD (that contained my operating system) for warranty. No big deal, I simply wiped that out and mailed it back.
- I had a spare 500GB hard drive (lets call it Drive B) that I decided to install my operating system on. I launched the Windows 7 installer, clicked on the few partitions this drive had, and hit "delete" to wipe them out. I clicked on the unallocated space, and installed the operating system on it.
- When I went to boot my computer, it worked fine. I went to mount Drive A, when it gave me an error; "Cannot mount volume. The host file/device is already in use." I checked in Disk Management, and saw that the drive appeared to be completely empty (apart from about 100MB). I used a 3rd party file explorer to see that the drive contained a bunch of weird files like "$upcase", "$badclus", "$boot", and dozens of other files all being named something with "bootmgr" in the name. This made me become extremely concerned.
- I immediately shut off my computer and removed Drive A. After taking out Drive A, the computer gave me an error to the extent of it not finding an operating system or not being able to boot or something. The only change I had made was removing that other drive, so I figure that somehow the bootloader was installed on Drive A (when the rest of the operating system is on Drive B). I reinstalled Windows 7 on Drive B (this time without Drive A being hooked up), and it worked completely fine and booted normally.
Is it possible that the Windows 7 installed somehow wiped out Drive A and installed the bootloader on it? I really have no idea what I'm doing here, but I really need to get my data back. I've tried various utilities like "Recuva", "EASIS", and a few others. The only files they detect are the "bootmgr" ones.
Do you have any suggestions for getting my files back? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.