Here's what happened (I'll leave out the why);
- The HDD originally had only 2 partitions, the 100MB one at the start, and a big one next to it.
- I shrunk the disk when it was in that state, in order to make space for an image I needed to restore and wanted to put onto that new small partition.
I created that end-partition, which is still there (called "oldw7boot").
This is what the disk looks like now in diskmgmt.msc:
and these are its properties in R-Studio (which is currently scanning the entire disk for another 4 hours):
(wow, just found out 23hq still has no TLS!)
So, the disk then held 3 partitions, the 100MB one at the start (no idea where that came from, probably once booted from this disk).
This is the state I'd like to get it back in.
I wanted to restore an old image on that new partition. I used Macrium Reflect for that (big mistake, unreliable software apparently).
The source of that image was a 335 GB volume, with only 120 GB of data on it. Reflect trims that, it says, so it only needs to save the actual data of the image. This is good for me, because that means the data it has overwritten, at the start of the disk I want to restore, is only the first 120 GB of the parition, and the rest of the 335 GB is probably left untouched by Reflect.
Anyway, so I restored that image, I carefully picked that NEW partition I created to restore the image to and on in Macrium's crapware.
It went ahead with that, it didn't even warn me. Yes, it mentions that you're overwriting a disk, but it doesn't specify partitions, it never does, so you're pretty much uncertain what it does from here on.
And lo and behold; It didn't do what I asked it to! It actually restored the image in *front* of the disk (onto its position on the image source disk probably, using that as if I wanted to restore a boot-disk, which I didn't ask it to)
So, it overwrote the most important large partition of that 3.5 TB disk with that old 335GB partition.
All the former data is undoubtedly mostly still on that large partition that once was 1, minus the starting 120 GB, which macrium overwrote.
I'm mostly here now hoping that the former GPT info is somehow still somewhere on the disk. Perhaps on that 100MB partition?
The source of that image used by Macrium Reflect was an MBR disk. Most likely it has ruined the GPT because of that?
I can provide more precise data if needed, using HDHacker or MBRwizzard.
I'm still amazed such large disks don't hold several versions of their state and structure as backups internally, especially since that's never big data anyway, just some text entries. By themselves I mean. Why do we always need to dive in deep to get data back, and then don't even have their filenames/dirnames? How can it be that in 2018 it's still not just pointers of file and folder locations stored somewhere else on the disk, perhaps even eprom or nand nowadays? (Clearly these file-systems and disks are not designed by me..)