I am an Idiot - Win7 accidental restore to data drive.

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
Salient
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2010 3:36 pm

I am an Idiot - Win7 accidental restore to data drive.

Post by Salient » Fri Apr 02, 2010 4:02 pm

Hello all,

At the suggestion of a friend I have posted my dilemma here with great hopes that some of you can help. I am hoping that, after reading this, you will be able to tell me that I have not Royally eFF'd my system but I fear that will be your verdict...

I will be as brief as possible so here it goes...I have seemingly LOST all of my data on both drives of my computer, arghh! This of course was no random occurrence as it would appear that I am just slightly above the level of a functioning idiot. Here is how I managed to do this, and by the way, some of what I did I understand, and some I do not (which of course begs the questions as to why I was doing it in the first place) I will number them below for easy reading:

1. I attempted to restore a backup of my C drive with Acronis Home 2010. Upon doing so the computer restarted and gave me a message saying there was no boot record found.

2. After several attempts and no luck I executed bootrec.ece/fixmbr, bootrec.exe/fixboot from a command prompt. This worked and allowed it to boot up but with a few problems and glitches.

3. HERE IS WHERE I GOT REALLY DUMB - I decided that since I had a good Acronis backup from when the system was working fine, I would just reinstall the OS and then restore with Acronis....After all I was only attempting to restore C: and not touch D:

4. Fast forward to seven days ago and the result of that reformat and my attempt with Acronis was that for some inexplicable reason I managed to restore the original image of C: on to my D: drive....

I spent the next several days reading about recovery software and have become fully convinced that if R-Studio cannot help, then nothing can.

5. I have now scanned my D: drive and R-Studio is reporting quite a large number of partitions, NTFS, HSF, FAT, etc. I do not however see any of them to show the original folder structure containing my data files.


Is there anyway to show my original data folder and file structure?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I will be grateful for any tips any of you may have.

Alt
Site Moderator
Posts: 3129
Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
Contact:

Re: I am an Idiot - Win7 accidental restore to data drive.

Post by Alt » Sat Apr 03, 2010 4:39 am

When you restored data from the disk C: image on disk D: you overwrote the original data of disk D: from the beginning to the size of disk C:. Actually, when you scanned disk D:, you found the remains of previous partitions from the image file.
If disk C: is much smaller than disk D:, there are chances that you'll be able to recover something from the end of the disk D: using scan for Known File Types (search for files using their file signatures). http://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unforma ... index.html -> Data Recovery Using R-Studio -> Advanced Data Recovery -> Disk Scan -> Known File Types.
There will be no folder/file tree and file names recovered, though.
If disk C: is approximately of the same size, there are no chances you can recover anything.

Post Reply