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An affordable mid range laptop sold by Acer in mid 2015. This laptop comes with a Nvidia 940m graphics card, Intel i5-5200U CPU, and a 1080p display.

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HDD randomly wiped, need to get my data back...

Hi,

I have 2 drives installed in my laptop, a 250GB Samsung SSD and a 1TB Toshiba HDD. Recently I dual booted my laptop with Windows 10 + Deepin Linux, for this I removed the bitlocker drive encryption from the HDD so it could be used with linux. The dual boot went fine, all drives were showing up and all has been working great for the past 3 days until today when both Windows and Deepin refused to boot, Deepin saying it can’t find “ata XXXXXXXXX” or something like that. I then removed the 1TB HDD and everything booted up, I reinstalled it and when windows loaded it said need to initialize the drive to be used, I clicked yes and now it says blank 1TB HDD, create a partition… I don’t want to lose the data on it, I’ve removed it from my laptop. Is there any program I can use to recover data or does it need to be taken to a recovery specialist?

Thanks

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First of all you should have ignored Windows request to initialize. I mean it is Microsoft we are talking about (eyes rolling).

You use Linux so you must be fairly "techie" so try TESTDISK to recover your partition and files.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It is freeware and well respected. I've recovered many a drive with it.

The professional way to go would be to do a sector by sector copy to another 1 TB before attempting recovery but if not possible just do TESTDISK.

There are other partition/file recovery program. Some are free and some cost but they cost a lot less than a data recovery person like me.

Let me know how it goes.

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First of all you should have ignored Windows request to initialize. I mean it is Microsoft we are talking about (eyes rolling).

You use Linux so you must be fairly "techie" so try TESTDISK to recover your partition and files.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It is freeware and well respected. I've recovered many a drive with it.

The professional way to go would be to do a sector by sector copy to another 1 TB before attempting recovery but if not possible just do TESTDISK.

There are other partition/file recovery program. Some are free and some cost but they cost a lot less than a data recovery person like me.

Let me know how it goes.

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Hi, thanks for the quick response. I Installed and ran TestDisk (Full log - https://pastebin.com/MTr6nv7X) and kept getting "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged." Whenever I tried to view the files in the data partition it discovered (This was just a data drive, no OS), the other 500MB recovery partitions displayed the contents just fine. I also confirmed in GParted that the drive was showing the correct size (931.51 GB), is there anything else I can do with TestDisk or should I use something like PhotoRec to try get some files back? Sorry HDD recovery is new to me, I really appriecate you trying to help.

Thanks

crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0crwdne2934271:0

What I use is Active Undelete on Windows to scan for deleted partitions. I would restore the NTFS ones as they are the ones that will have data for a Windows operating system.

Then you can scan for deleted files on those partitions once you've restored it. Might take a while but it's worth it in that case.

Best practice is to actually have this 2.5" laptop drive plugged into an external hard drive enclosure or desktop (skip check disk if connected to desktop if prompted) then use the Active Undelete software (since it runs on windows and installing windows on that same drive would be a bad idea as writing data on a wiped drive means it'll make deleted files unrecoverable the more data is written on those wiped blocks of the hard drive).

You might be better giving this to a data recovery specialist if this is too technical / time consuming for you.

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Do a sector by sector copy disk to another disk before reading further. If you screw up you can always start again. If you screw up on the original disk,as you have partially done, that's it - apart from big $$$$

The bright side is that your data should be easily recovered. The down side is that it very difficult to explain what to do. There are so many variables operating here. I could write a book on it.

You could try something like "EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free":

https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizar...

Or their partition software.

There are a few bootable USB with a Windows 10 PE and data recovery software. Check out Majorgeeks:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details...

Sergrei has some good stuff.

If the free version finds your files it will recover, I believe, 1Gb of them. If you need more buy the pro version.

If you want a learning experience then copy the drive to another and experiment.

Good luck!

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