6TB Drive reformatted by MSFT media creation tool! Please help!

f14tomcat said:

As I thought, thank you. Just wanted to verify that it was the real live data, and not a migrated copy you might have somewhere else you could have used to recover. Sorry, just had to clarify.

Oh no problem at all. I have a lot of it backed up but some stuff I only just transferred to it and was intending to create a backup later. STUPID I know! Just "didn't think it could happen to me"!

SIW2 said:

If you convert it back to ntfs, you don't need data recovery.

I was in my car on my phone earlier, so now I can explain why this won't work to recover any data. The original 6TB drive was likely GPT partitioned with an NTFS partition on it. What the Media Creation Tool did to the drive was do the equivalent of the diskpart clean command and then converted the drive to MBR. Then it created a single 32 GB FAT32 partition on it marked as active. This makes the drive universally bootable on both legacy BIOS and UEFI computers.

Now, what the FAT to NTFS conversion will do is simply convert that single FAT32 partition to NTFS. So you will end up with a 6TB physical drive, MBR partition type, with 1 32GB NTFS partition on it. This is dangerous to do in your situation because any writing to the drive will weaken your chances of data recovery. To make things worse, you could then expand that 32GB NTFS partition to the maximum size allowed by MBR with is approx 2 TB. Doing that would virtually wipe out any previous data you might have been able to recover in that 2 TB section. To expand that NTFS partition further, you would then have to convert the now MBR drive to GPT.

Your recovery actions should consist of running partition/file recovery software to maybe save what files you can out of that 5+TB unallocated space. Then you will need to convert the drive back to GPT (which is easiest done by wiping out the drive first with diskpart clean, followed by diskpart convert gpt commands). Then you can put a new 6TB NTFS partition on it for your data.

NavyLCDR said:

I was in my car on my phone earlier, so now I can explain why this won't work to recover any data. The original 6TB drive was likely GPT partitioned with an NTFS partition on it. What the Media Creation Tool did to the drive was do the equivalent of the diskpart clean command and then converted the drive to MBR. Then it created a single 32 GB FAT32 partition on it marked as active. This makes the drive universally bootable on both legacy BIOS and UEFI computers.

Now, what the FAT to NTFS conversion will do is simply convert that single FAT32 partition to NTFS. So you will end up with a 6TB physical drive, MBR partition type, with 1 32GB NTFS partition on it. This is dangerous to do in your situation because any writing to the drive will weaken your chances of data recovery. To make things worse, you could then expand that 32GB NTFS partition to the maximum size allowed by MBR with is approx 2 TB. Doing that would virtually wipe out any previous data you might have been able to recover in that 2 TB section. To expand that NTFS partition further, you would then have to convert the now MBR drive to GPT.

Your recovery actions should consist of running partition/file recovery software to maybe save what files you can out of that 5+TB unallocated space. Then you will need to convert the drive back to GPT (which is easiest done by wiping out the drive first with diskpart clean, followed by diskpart convert gpt commands). Then you can put a new 6TB NTFS partition on it for your data.

Yeh That makes a lot of sense. I forgot it was GPT. Thanks for that explanation and for STOPPING me as soon as you saw the possibility of that happening. I'll just let the file recover app run over the next few days and see what comes up. Fingers crossed! Thanks