External 1tb HDD shrunk to 32gb after using to create boot usb

tspoon999 · 30 Jan 2017

Hello All,

First and foremost thank you to everyone on this forum for the help, i know it has helped people all over the world, it has certainly helped me solve a number of issues.

The issue in a nutshell - i need to recover important data from my external 1tb hard drive.

The HDD just contains important files (approximately 200gb worth) not the entire windows 10 OS.

My Problem started when I used my external HDD to create a boot USB to do a clean install of windows 10 on my laptop. During the process of creating a boot USB, i cannot remember it saying the HDD will be formatted. Anyway after completing the Win10 install, my HDD came up as ESD-USB of 32gb. In windows disk management the remaining 980gb on the drive was showing as unallocated. I then used the partition recovery wizard on Aomei and it identified 8 allocations of 3.01mb and named these boot and a different letter each. In windows explorer these allocations can be seen but are empty. The screen shot from windows disk management looks as shown in the attachment.

I am no expert but i have the feeling the data that i want to get at is in the unallocated spaces between each boot drive. Please can someone help me extract this data. I know i can just format my HDD to get the full HDD but I don't want to loose the files just yet.

Thank you very much in advance

Winuser · 30 Jan 2017

You could try different file recovery programs. I've had some success getting some of my files back by trying different programs. I'm not recommending any of these programs this is just a list by doing a Google search. file recovery software‬‏ - بحث Google

spunk · 30 Jan 2017

When you create a bootable Windows install media, it will wipe the drive first during the process. It is suggested to use a USB Flash drive with nothing on it to do this. When the Windows files were loaded onto the drive, it most likely overwritten the files you want to recover.
When you recover lost partitions or files, do not save them to the same drive, as this will also overwrite the files you are trying to recover.
You may have already done too much damage to the drive to recover anything else.
But try the free TestDisk program, I have had the best luck with GetDataBack. You need another drive of the same size or larger to restore your files to.