Hi, I have done something really stupid and wiped my hard drives on my Lenovo laptop and now have nothing at all to boot up. For information I was using Mini Tool Partion and thought I was wiping an external hard drive that I had connected via usb. I am looking for some advise on whats the best way to get my laptop up and running again please.
Do not panic yet - it may be possible to recover the drive.
Do you have access to another pc - do not do anything yet to existing pc ie attempt to install anything.
On laptop, download iso from here and create a bootable usb drive eg using rufus.
Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk - - Windows 10 Forums
Boot your pc from this awesome recovery drive
Run minitool (on this recovery drive) which you know anyway
Highlight your drive that has been wiped
Select Disk - Partition Recovery and follow instructions.
If you have no attempted yet to write anything to the drive, with luck, you will recover the partitions.
Hi, just found this on the web,
About "Wipe Partition"
Wipe Partition feature in MiniTool Partition Wizard can erase all data on the specified partition permanently, and the erased data can't be recovered by any data recovery solution. Therefore, wiping partition is a quite good way to prevent private or confidential information from being leaked. MiniTool Partition Wizard tutorial below will show users detailed steps.
Not sure now if what you said to do will me now what do you think.
I tried last night and as I thought I can't recover my hard drive so I suppose all I can do is to try and install W10 which I will try tonight. I did make back ups of my hard drive folders ie downloads, pictures, documents and keys so all is not lost if the install of windows 10 goes ok.
If anyone would like to of any advice on doing a fresh install of W10 that would be great.
Do you know how to install Windows? If not there is a guide here Clean Install Windows 10 - Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials .
If you haven't already and have access to another PC put the Windows Installer on a USB so you are ready to start this evening. Details are in the previous link.
The one thing you need to consider is your initial internet access. If you don't have Ethernet cable to plug in then you should download the Wi-Fi driver from Lenovo site and put it on a USB key just in case Windows doesn't recognize your WiFi card. Once you have internet you can get all the other drivers.
I did a clean install Windows on my Lenovo X201 a couple of weeks ago after I used Partition Wizard to merge 2 partitions and my larger files (VMs etc) from the old D drive came out as 0 bytes in size on the merged C drive. These things happen and it doesn't matter if you have backup.
You should look on the bright side - timing wise you'll be clean installing the latest version of Windows just days after its release and you have all your documents backed up. The whole process (assuming you have an installer USB) should only take an hour or so (plus weeks to customize it as you like :) )
Lots of people suggest making a system image after install using Macrium but personally I don't mind doing clean installs if the need arises.
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