HELP! Diskpart CLEAN run on wrong drive

[cfoster3448]

I was trying to setup my A1200 on a CF card using WinUAE. One of the steps indicated that I need to go into DISKPART and select the disk I want to mount/copy/install workbench to, but I accidentally selected the wrong drive, then issued the "clean" command.



After that step, I went into WinUAE and loaded some .adfs (some games and other utilities) into the DF0 and DF1 floppy drives. After fiddling with WinUAE for a while, and giving up (for now) to work on something else, and I noticed that my "Z:" drive is missing. Then I discovered that I selected the wrong danged drive from step1.



I've tried several "partition recovery" software(s), but none of them seem to work or find my "missing" partition.



Am I screwed? Do I just wipe the Z: drive, reformat and start over?


I've got years of personal data on that drive (no, I did not use backup software to save it). That I would like to restore if at all possible. Anyone have any suggestions that might help me? If I can get the data off of there copied to a new drive, then I can repartition/format/etc. with a clean slate.



So far, I have tried Partition Find&Mount, testdisk, and a couple of other utilities (can't remember their names) with no luck at all. Please HELP!!!!

[Mad-Matt]

You are not likely to be able to recover the partitions as they have been zeroed out, the whole point of the clean command. But with good file recovery software, you might be able to get the files back as the data hasnt actually been destroyed/deleted. . I've used the free tool 'Recuva' in the past with some success although i'm sure there is far better commercial software out there.

[nogginthenog]

MicroSoft released "Windows File Recovery" recently. Might be worth a look at.
Backup the drive if you can. You will need a tool to create an image of the drive.

I think I've used Recuva also.

[rutra80]

Did you try TestDisk?
What filesystem was there?

[thomas]

I never examined a PC-formatted drive, but on an Amiga-formatted drive DiskPart CLEAN only erases the very first sector. With the Amiga partition table spanning many sectors with each entry in its own sector, it is very easy to recover the partition table.

So I would say there is big hope that your Z drive can be recovered, too. You just need to find the right software.

[Saghalie]

GetDataBack Simple - will work just fine to get your files back (if they're Windows). There is a NT program and a MSDOS program.

Give it a whirl... it's not free - but there is a demo that works - and it's not expensive. So you just have to weight the cost versus ... do you want your data back?

Good luck!

[cfoster3448]

Wow! Thanks for the quick response! The only reason I posted in the WinUAE forum was because of what I did by 'CLEAN'ing it in diskpart, and then loading/mounting the .ADF files. I'm really new to WinUAE, and wasn't sure if I could maybe unload/unmount those .ADF images and retain the partition info. But looking at the partition info after running WinUAE, it had split my 4tb HD into three partitions with an 880k file mounted on each partition.



Thanks for the recommendations and input from everyone - I'm running Recuva now, and it's 12% into scanning 600k found files (and only 20 hours to go). LOL!! I was just hoping for a "quicker" fix I guess - unload/unmount the ADF's, run Partition Find&Mount (or testdisk) and recover the partition(s) I previously had.



I feel confident using Recuva - have used it before on an SD card to restore some video from a security camera SD card that went corrupt/unreadable/wonky. Just hafta wait for Recuva to finish doing it's thang...


Thanks again everyone!!