Windows 10: External 2TB HDD contents gone after creating bootable partition

So I did a partition on my Seagate external 2TB, used easeUS to move existing data at the back and created another 35GB partition for a windows recovery drive at the front which I have given a drive letter of 'R:' (the remaining data was having the drive letter at default 'D:' ) . Upon initiating 'create a recovery drive' on the existing OS win 10 on my Asus laptop, I am sure when prompted to choose a drive of with at least 32GB for system files to be copied, I have chosen R: not D: now when it was prompting that everything on the drive will be deleted I just clicked ok. Suddenly there was a prompt telling me to use D: it should first be formatted I click 'cancel' then as I can see what was there on the Directory was D: with some bootable files at the 35GB capacity. Where did my originally D: which has an enormous amount of backups I needed went? was I doing the wrong thing making a portion of my external HDD bootable? or is there something wrong with Windows 10 recovery drive function? this is so frustrating, please advise. Thanks!

:)

 

Windows 10 deleted partition - What I found out

I tired to update from Windows 10 build 10586 to Windows 10 build 14393 a few weeks ago and my HDD(a 3TB HDD) got wiped. Windows10 wiped the partition. Investigating what happened I found out the 2TB of a 3TB HDD was gone. I have not been able to find the
2TB partition or recovery any file. The 3TB HDD only showed a 100MB recovery drive and 786GB of unallocated space because the HDD started out as a Windows 7 HDD. Using Mini Tool Partition Wizard I discovered 7 boot partitions 3MB in size, a 250 GB partition,
and a 100 MB partition, all which were not visible using Drive Management under Windows 10. I attached this 3TB HDD using an enclosure to another Windows 10 computer. Basically Windows 10 turned this 3TB HDD to a 746GB HDD. The 2TB partition is not recoverable.
So Windows 10 cost my not only the software I lost but 2TB of HDD space. Now I have to add that I have a Laptop and another computer that started out as Windows 7 that I have very little or no problem with Windows 10 or the updates but neither of these computer
contain alot of additional software like the one Windows 10 killed the HDD on. I turned the unallocated drive to a logical drive and assigned it a letter and then it showed 273 GB of used space. I then looked a this partition using the Mini Tool software and
it showed files, so I turned the logical drive into a primary where I was able to check the files in windows explorer. My point is I was able to recover files. This is what happened to me.

 

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.

 

Welcome to the forum. Were you have gone wrong is drive letters can change when you add new paritions post a screen shot from disk manager so we can see

 

The problem is that when you create a recovery drive using Windows tools (either the built-in tool or the Media Creation Tool) there is a warning that everything on that drive will be erased. The problem is that the warning is referring to the entire PHYSICAL drive - and not just the drive letter (partition) that is specified. The first thing either one of the recovery creation tools does is wipe the entire PHYSICAL drive specified - just like using the diskpart clean command. Then it creates a FAT32 partition at the front of the physical drive - and if the physical drive has a capacity greater than 32 GB, the rest of the drive is left unallocated.

So, @amdc, when you see the results of disk management on that external 2TB drive, you will see a 32GB FAT32 partition at the front of the drive, and the rest of the drive is unallocated. You will need to use specialized data recovery software to recover the partition that was deleted. Since you moved the data to the end of the drive, you might get lucky and be able to get it back.

EDIT: ah... I see you posted disk management, and I was, unfortunately, correct. Good luck with the partition recovery.... but you should be fine.

 

Alright so the pictures have now been sent currently being moderated as noted by tenforums. By the way Samuria as you can see for the nth time windows 10 is trying to reformat the whole external drive even if the letters have been adjusted as you can see I have already recovered the lost partition for the nth time making sure it doesn't get referenced as D: this time, to be precise it was allocated an E: by easeUS upon recovering, I did try creating a recovery drive again and as you can see on easeUS the D: partition was the 32GB (got resized automatically by windows during first try leaving me an unallocated 3.73GB in the middle of D: and E*Smile but its fine, then proceeded with choosing D: as the recovery drive , prompted for data deletion, continue pressing ok and then suddenly the previous formatting notification about D: drive popped up and as I figured the E: drive is again unallocated so right now I am recovering it once again, so it does seem windows 10 doesn't want to create a recovery without wiping my whole drive?

 

thanks for that information, now I was previously reading a guide that it was somewhat doable without touching the existing data on the drive, well I think they are wrong and you are right *Smile I'm just gonna get another usb for the recovery

 

Once you have made a recovery USB flash drive, you can then transfer it to a FAT32 partition on an external hard drive and it will work as desired. My laptop and desktop computers both have SSDs as their primary drives and 1 TB HDDs as secondary drives. I have FAT32 rescue partitions on both of the HDDs, and backup images saved in the NTFS partition that follows the FAT32 partition. But you can't let Windows or the Microsoft Media Creation Tool create the FAT32 partition because it will erase the remainder of the physical drive before it creates the FAT32 partition.

 

At this point, perhaps, get a local data recovery person to walk you through the recovery process; from my experiences, it is too easy to make an honest mistake or two when it is personal data, not somebody else's data that is involved. And, summarizing a few data recovery people -- it might not be best to use a computer hardware/software technician for the data recovery process.