I wiped my drive...help recover!!

D

dsa44

n00b
Joined
Oct 11, 2011
Messages
15
Major brain freeze and my error here! I have a Seagate Freeagent USB backup drive which had lots of backup stuff on it. I was getting ready to upgrade to Win10, and the media creation tool gave me the option to save the files to a usb drive.

Well you see where this is going.... I thought I could use my Freeagent USB to add the win10 install files to it for later usage. It did NOT warn me that it is going to WIPE the drive and create a bootable USB Win10 install media!!!!

So now I have the Freeagent drive with none of my backup files.

What would be the best way or tool to use to try to unformat and recover my backups and such? Preferably an open source, easy to use software, I have heard of Recuva.
I've been beating myself up over this .....
Thx
 
Deleting the files and recovering them is relatively easy...UNLESS you've written to the drive after the deletion...
 
The media creation tool does in fact warn that it will erase the drive. You probably just missed it.

In any case, you might be able to recover some of the stuff, but you will need a tool that can try to recover the old partition data.

Anything that was written over will not be recoverable.

Recuva might work but unsure how it handles deleted partitions.

Testdisk would probably do the job but it is a command-line utility.. no GUI.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

You could probably find an old version of GetDataBack (NTFS and FAT versions existed).

NEVER EVER recover files to the same drive you are trying to recover them from.

And another point... you should have an online backup service. External drives or any other drives you have locally are not a good backup solution.
 
Well the Win10 media creation tool seemed to have formatted the Freeagent drive and installed its bootable stuff for the win10 install. Is there a tool or method you can suggest? Thx
 
Yes I also have a Raid NAS, but this Freeagent may have have some other stuff too.
I will check out Testdisk......
 
dsa44 said:
It did NOT warn me that it is going to WIPE the drive and create a bootable USB Win10 install media!!!!
Click to expand...
oh?

wimc_tool_03.jpg
 
Look, its my fault, but I missed the warning and it was much smaller.
I've kicked myself enough, but go ahead keep kicking if you must.
I'm just looking for a little help.....once y'all get it out of your system....!
 

Attachments

  • win3.jpg
    win3.jpg
    63.1 KB · Views: 0
try easeus data reccovery or get data back. see if they see anything. keep in mind that whatever was in the area that the creation tool wrote to is lost.
 
i was gonna ask if you had a backup and then saw that it was your backup that got destroyed.

sucks man.
 
After I calmed down a bit, I guess I'm not too worried, I have other backups on a raid NAS and online, just wanted to know for sure if there was anything major-league different on this Freeagent that I don't have elsewhere. I guess I will try a couple things like Recuva and Disk Drill, but to be honest, even if they find a bunch of file0001, etc, it would probably take me way too much time to figure out what they might be......sigh....
 
I second getdataback, its worked great for me in that past in similar situations as yours (you can even do a free trial to see what files it sees, and do a few recoveries to test it out)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top