Windows 10: External 1tb HDD shrunk to 32gb after using to create boot usb

Hello All,

First and foremost thank you to everyone on this forum for the help, i know it has helped people all over the world, it has certainly helped me solve a number of issues.

The issue in a nutshell - i need to recover important data from my external 1tb hard drive.

The HDD just contains important files (approximately 200gb worth) not the entire windows 10 OS.

My Problem started when I used my external HDD to create a boot USB to do a clean install of windows 10 on my laptop. During the process of creating a boot USB, i cannot remember it saying the HDD will be formatted. Anyway after completing the Win10 install, my HDD came up as ESD-USB of 32gb. In windows disk management the remaining 980gb on the drive was showing as unallocated. I then used the partition recovery wizard on Aomei and it identified 8 allocations of 3.01mb and named these boot and a different letter each. In windows explorer these allocations can be seen but are empty. The screen shot from windows disk management looks as shown in the attachment.

I am no expert but i have the feeling the data that i want to get at is in the unallocated spaces between each boot drive. Please can someone help me extract this data. I know i can just format my HDD to get the full HDD but I don't want to loose the files just yet.

Thank you very much in advance

:)

 

Recovering data from USB bootable HDD

I used my external HDD to create a bootable usb windows 10 installer and it wiped everything on it without informing. Now I've lost everything inside. The 1TB HDD now only shows 32GB so i'm assuming it's a partition.

Is there anyway to recover all my data?

Thanks in advance.

 

hhd will not read after making it a bootable usb to install windows 10

so I used my external hdd to download and install windows 10. it is 1tb but now it only reads as a 32gb hdd.? I have looked online and tried what they suggested and still nothing. I am worried that now I will not be able to get to my other stuff on my
hdd..what should I do? as it is now the computer only see 32gb of this 1tb drive.

thanks for you help

 

You could try different file recovery programs. I've had some success getting some of my files back by trying different programs. I'm not recommending any of these programs this is just a list by doing a Google search. file recovery software‬‏ - بحث Google

 

When you create a bootable Windows install media, it will wipe the drive first during the process. It is suggested to use a USB Flash drive with nothing on it to do this. When the Windows files were loaded onto the drive, it most likely overwritten the files you want to recover.
When you recover lost partitions or files, do not save them to the same drive, as this will also overwrite the files you are trying to recover.
You may have already done too much damage to the drive to recover anything else.
But try the free TestDisk program, I have had the best luck with GetDataBack. You need another drive of the same size or larger to restore your files to.