Data Recovery

Hi, so i by mistake installed windows 11 onto the wrong drive, so happens i had all my personal stuff on that drive like pictures and so on. My ? is can i recovery the info that was on there? And if i can recovery it can it be done by software i can buy online? or do i need to take it to someone who specializes in these types of matter?
thanks everyone

Unplug it immediately so nothing else gets written to it. I don't know what tools you can use, but the longer the drive is in use, the more data you could lose.

Stop using the drive to not mess it up any further. I'd recommend pulling a full disk image of the drive, and mess with the image rather than the original disk. Ideally, actually mess with a copy of the image and not the image, so you can copy the image again without touching the original disk. TestDisk and PhotoRec are your best bets for this job; I'd guess PhotoRec is more likely to work than TestDisk, given you've probably overwritten a large amount of the old filesystem metadata, so it's not likely to be as easy as bringing that back. But PhotoRec will scan the whole drive looking for pictures and other stuff. You're in for a long slog sorting all that out though. So do your future self a favor and setup regular backups when you're done with this.

If it's super important, commercial recovery services exist, but they're expensive, and they're not likely to get all that much more out of the drive than you can; three letter agencies may be able to recover old data from sectors that have been overwritten, but it's not really feasible with sane amount of resources. Where the recovery companies shine is recovering from board level issues by swapping boards over.

Drive Savers is, I think, the preeminent commercial data recovery service; if you call them, let us know how much they quote you to start, but it's going to be a lot.

There is a WinPE called Hiren's Boot CD. It has been around for decades with continual updates. It includes a host legit useful software. Make yourself a boot USB and use one of the recovery utillities. I have used Recova before but I would try many of them and see what you can get back. Boot with Hiren's and have your drive you want to recover data from and another drive that you want to write the saved data to.
https://www.hirensbootcd.org/
https://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ Software list.
Also make that boot disk on another PC and do not boot with the drive you wish to recover anymore until you are satisfied with the recovery.

getdataback from runtime.org is what I use

Such a shit feeling, sorry OP!

Wow thanks everyone such info, i should of posted that i do not know much about doing things with software so i will look into some and i will get a price from my local computer guy and keep ya all up to date ...
thanks again

What kind of drive was it?

Honestly, these days this kind of data recovery is less likely than it used to be IF it has been overwritten.

Back in the day, some ghosting remained on hard drives after an overwrite, but with modern hard drives this is less the case, and a single overwrite can make the data irretrievable. This is also the case with SSD'd.

It is possible that some of the files can be recovered if you can recreate the old partitions. T he way drive management works, deleted files are not ERASED they are just deindexed. The data remains in the drive until it is overwritten. The stuff towards the beginning of the partition has probably been overwritten by Windows files and is likely permanently gone, but the stuff towards the latter portion of the partition MIGHT be salvageable if you are lucky.

If the files are really valuable to you you might consider paying a professional to do it for you. Experience is valuable with this stuff.

Again, this is a shitty time for a reminder, but always keep backups of important and irreplaceable files.

This is the second time recently I've mentioned this company but I can recommend Drive Savers Data Recovery. I've used them four times over the last 20 years. Three were successful and one failed because there was physical damage to the platters. A head scraped all the magnetic material off the platter on a single platter drive and it was part of a RAID 5 set. They couldn't do anything about it. I haven't used them in a few years but you used to only pay if they were successful in recovering your data. The cost was based on what it took to recover. A couple were in the $200 something range and the third was $4000+.