I think I screwed up, bad

DVA12924 · 29 Jul 2020

Very new here so please forgive the lack of profile info/signature if required.

I have a 500gb ssd that had windows on it and quite a lot on that drive (450ish GB of programs and files). I also had a few other ssd drives that I used as storage. The drive with Windows was getting very full so I wanted to move it to a bigger 1tb ssd. I was able to clone the disk over without issues.

I then went into bios and set the new ssd as the boot drive and restarted but it still booted from the old disk. Being extremely sleep deprived, I wasn’t thinking clearly and trying to follow tutorials on my phone from different sites on how to get windows to boot to the new drive. I stupidly thought “maybe I have to format the drive that had windows on it originally” so I went and did that and restarted again. I was then met with an error that windows wasn’t installed on the drive that I cloned to, but it was, I checked before. Then I realized it wasn’t formatted to MBR and that’s why it wasn’t booting from it. Using command prompt, I cleaned the disk and set it to MBR. Well, I cleaned the disk. Yep. That happened. So now I was left with a bunch of empty drives with unallocated space on them.

I remembered I had a USB with windows recovery/setup on it and popped it in and tried to get windows to restore from the cloned restore but I wouldn’t read the data or I didn’t know where to find the right file/driver. So I decided it’d be great to just reinstall windows, use a 3rd party program to recover the lost partitions and data that would have the full clone on it and try again. But my stupidity didn’t end there. Nope. I went 1 step further and reinstalled windows over the cloned drive that was cleaned and set to MBR from diskpart ... the drive I needed to recover and restore.

Using yet more 3rd party software to try to scan the drives, it found no lost partitions, but did find about 100gb of data ranging from 2018 up to an hour ago, but none of it looked like what I wanted. There’s really only a few excel files that were on the desktop that I really really want to have recovered, everything else was installed programs. There is a system restore point that was created when the drive was originally cloned, but a scan of that shows it would delete newer drivers, and no programs would be restored so looks like it’s not much of a restore point

Is there any way, any way at all, that I can recover this data? How would I find and recover it? Im using programs from EaseUS and used AOMEI to format (set everything to 0s) the original drive that had windows on it.I’m laughing at how stupid I’ve been in this process, being sleep deprived and treading in waters I’ve never been in before has not been good for me lol. Please help!

spunk · 29 Jul 2020

I Reinstalled windows over the cloned drive that was cleaned and set to MBR from diskpart ... the drive I needed to recover and restore..... Im using programs from EaseUS and used AOMEI to format (set everything to 0s) the original drive that had windows on it

When you do a Quick Format on a drive, the data is still there, it just removes the Headers or the Table of Contents of the files on the drive. If you do a Wipe of the drive (set everything to 0's) then you have overwritten the drive with 0's. And the previous data is no longer available. Usually when you convert a drive from GPT to MBR you also wipe the drive. If you did not Wipe the drive, but installed Windows on the drive you have also overwritten the drive. But some of the files may be able to be restored.
So, you should be able to restore the files to another drive using the mentioned software as long as you didn't overwrite it. You will need a drive of the same size or larger to restore the files to.