Help! Any recommended hard drive recovery software?? I just lost everything on my PC!

[Josiah23]

Is it possible to recover something like this?

I just lost everything on my 2TB secondary hard drive!...

Tons of photos, videos, documents, games, game engine projects, visual studio projects, etc... was on there.

Anyone have any suggestions?



Edited: Recuva doesn't work

Currently trying testdisk

 

[xandros9]

Depends on whether we're looking at file deletion or hardware failure.

If it's hardware failure, we're in trouble. I remember once where the backup hard drive I had was first to die. I think we're talking either professional recovery services or some MacGyver hacks like the freezer trick. (really depends though, I had a stuck head so the freezer helped temporarily but...)

If Recuva doesn't work, that's not good. Recuva is my go-to... Any sounds? I also hope that you had backups of at least the most important data there.

 

[Josiah23]

It's a file deletion.

My external HDD not only got erased but formatted into something else so Recuva couldn't recognize it And the drive shrunk from 2TB to about 140GB?

I did find some document and application backups on another drive but a good chunk is still missing. The rest can be replaceable but will be a pain to do, lol.

 

[xandros9]

I would pull up Disk Management to see what the partitions look like, maybe you need to expand that 140 to its rightful 2000-something.

 

[Josiah23]

@xandros9

I already went ahead and fixed it back to the 2TB partition, but I had no luck with restoring my data back...


Edited: I'm running Recuva again with the formatted HDD, and it's now finding some stuff. It says it's going to take a few hours but I'm hoping for the best.

 

[Josiah23]

No luck.

It recover thousands and thousands of .Ogg .Wav .Png and .jpg files but non aren't anything I know of...
Man!! It's alright though.

 

[matt john2]

I once had this problem I accidentally deleted the partition, testdisk was the one I've used. I did recovered most my files even the ones I've deleted long ago but man was it tedious to sort those millions of recovered files. Photos and music were my main priority of recovering so I move all the image files and music files to their own folders. Imported the images to Lightroom and bam! they're automatically got sorted out and I basically did same thing with my music files. And btw, there's this live OS forked out of Windows (8.1?) I use for maintenance called Winpese loaded with lots of powerful recovery and maintenance tools and softwares though I've never used the recovery softwares as it was after the incident that I discovered Winpese. Winpese is a very handy tool for all sorts of Windows maintenance you might want to look at it if Recuva didn't work.
Edit: I believe some of the loaded softwares in winpese are "premium(?)" versions as I've used the Acronis True Image once and I believe I've also seen the data recovery software called EaseUS which you might want to try

 

[matt john2]

For sorting out songs just load it to a music player, I personally used Mediamonkey as I find it easier to deal with in these situations, the metadata of the song will do the job for you. For accurately renaming those songs I use Musicbrainz. As for the other files, I didn't bother recovering them as it was a complete chaos, so for those other files like games you have lost you might be out of luck as I don't of any tools that will sort them back to their original package folder

 

[midnightfrolic]

most likely data recovery time.

use this opportunity to invest in online data backup and redundant backups.