Used Clean Command And Lost ALL Partitions

GeForceX

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 19, 2003
Messages
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I used the search function and found that some people went through the same issues as I did but how they lost their partition is different. I think it is best that I provide some context.

I was going to re-install Windows 7 on my 2 TB hard drive in which had two partitions from within. The first partition was 1.5 for media and the rest was for the OS. At first, installing Windows 7 was throwing errors due to the BIOS not setting SATA to AHCI so I fixed that. After that, it would refuse to install Windows 7 because it was still "mounted" for whatever reason (I was running off of my Windows 7 DVD). Forcing it to dismount didn't work. So I used diskpart to clean out the partition so I can format it and then install the OS. I pointed to the OS partition and used 'clean'. Then suddenly, I noticed my other partition (media) on that drive was gone too. Basically it is now one hard drive with no partitions on it with no file system. I don't understand how or why that happened.

Of course, I did not back up my data. It contains a large amount of important documents, cases, photos, and everything else that may be lost forever if I don't get this to revive. I did some research and used testdisk to see if I can recover anything. I made a bootable USB stick using GParted. I was able to run testdisk from there and after analyzing and 'deeper searching' (literally many hours), it found two partitions. Great! Then I press 'p' to take a look at the files that it has found -- it quits the program. Tutorials everywhere mentioned pressing 'p', even testdisk itself said to press 'p', so that I can view the files before I could 'write' to recreate the MBR and partition. I run it again (hours again) and then I pressed 'p', it quits again. Seems like a bug of some sort -- the 'p just quits it. There was someone else on another forum in the same exact predicament as I am but no one answered him. Tough for us.

I am deducing that it's just a faulty Live CD OS so I am currently downloading a new Live CD of another kind.

But right now, I am pretty much losing my patience and I thought it was time to ask for a little guidance here. In theory, it really shouldn't be all that hard to revive a partition. I do NOT have another hard drive unfortunately and so I am trying to just restore everything right there on my computer. In short of re-doing testdisk, can someone recommend something?

It is not everyday that I ask for help but I hope someone can chime in. :)
 
O&O Disk Recovery is a good program.

I'm not sure if it would run properly on a Windows Live CD/DVD such as BartPE or Hiren's.
 
The clean command removes all partitions by wiping the MBR, which stores the partition info, bootloader, etc.
 
Make sure and set up some sort of backup when you get things squared away! :eek:
 
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