Hard drive appears wiped after installing Windows 7 to another drive

[Danny247]

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.

 

[Layback Bear]

Danny I don't know if I can help but lets see if we can get a little more information.
It is possible that you did wipe the hard drive with your saved things if you had that hard drive hooked up when you installed Windows 7.

It's also possible the information is still there but you are no longer able to decrypt it or get access to the encrypted drive.

Post one of these so other members can see what is what.
Please use this method to do so.

BY Golden:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html

 

[Danny247]

Thank you very much for your reply, regardless of whether or not you can actually solve my problem Here's my Disk Management page; The "F" drive (Disk 2) is the one that I need to recover the data on.

 

[Layback Bear]

You have 3 active drives. When everything is install correctly you only need Reserve active.
I wouldn't change anything at this time.
Your backup drive (D) is full.
Are you saying you can't access drive (D)?

If drive (D) is not the drive you are trying to access whatever drive is the one you are trying to access try the process below.

Start Orb and select Computer and then select Drive (D) and see if you can open drive (D).
You posted that it is encrypted then you will have to use what ever code you have to access it.
If that doesn't work use Windows Explorer and in the left hand plain select drive (D) and see if you can open it.

If neither work I'm out of ideas except the encryption is stopping you from accessing the drive or the drive has failed.

 

[TVeblen]

As Layback Bear said, you should only have one fixed hard drive partition marked as Active. Windows will often ignore a second active partition.

I'm sure the 3rd Active partition shown is a thumbdrive with CENTOS OS on it. Remove that before testing (of course).

I would also disconnect all the other non-OS hard drives during diagnostic testing.

Then with just "Drive A" and "Drive B" connected, try removing the active flag from "Drive A" (the problem disk).
See here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/197157-partition-mark-inactive.html

Afterward, install your decryption software on "Drive B" (your main OS drive) and then see if you can access your encrypted files on "Drive A" with it.

 

[Danny247]

After making the partition inactive, TrueCrypt still gives me the error of "Incorrect password or not a TrueCrypt volume." It's definitely the correct password, I have a batch file setup that I've always used to decrypt/access the drive :/

Just to avoid confusion, the drive that I need to access is Disk 2 (Drive F). Thanks so much for the continued help, is there anything else that I can try? :/

 

[TVeblen]

The Encryption software is the stumbling block I believe. I do not play with encryption so I'm only guessing now, but it seems logical that Windows and Recuva can't recognize usable data because it is encrypted, and TrueCrypt can't recognize the data because it probably relies on the MBR of the drive to do so, and the MBR was deleted.

I'm not even sure if rebuilding the MBR would be of any use.

You might check to see if you can get help or info from Truecrypt support, or see if they have a forum. Maybe someone has had this problem before.

EDIT: Have you seen this:
ww.truecrypt.org/docs/rescue-disk

 

[Layback Bear]

According to the picture of Drive Management your (F) drive is empty. 100 % free space.
I really don't know if a encrypted drive would show empty just because of the encryption if their was data on it.

These might be helpful.

TrueCrypt - Rescue Disk

TrueCrypt - Tutorial 1/5

 

[Danny247]

Alright, I'll try posting on the TrueCrypt forums. I fear that I actually didn't create a rescue disk or if I did, I no longer have it :/

Thanks again, and if you have any additional suggestions PLEASE let me know. I'll definitely be backing up all my future data.

 

[Layback Bear]

Wish you luck and yes please keep us informed. The information you gather could help others.