Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 8th, 2017, 1:32

Hi guys.

I really hope I haven't messed up too badly here, but I hope I can recover something from Drive D: (WD2003FZEX Western Digital 2TB HDD) in my computer (Windows 10 Pro).

I used Eraser (from Heidi) to try and format drive E: (my other drive which I wanted to delete) and erase any data. I started the process and, somehow, I must have selected drive D: by mistake! No good. I panicked and switched off my computer about 10 seconds after the process started (when programs started to crash). When I switched my computer back on again I used Windows Disk Management to allocate space to the drive, then did a QUICK format to make it viewable in This PC. It now shows as an empty and unencrypted format with no data. Realizing I'm probably making a mistake I've decided to just stop what I'm doing, switch off the computer, and remove the hard drive.

Is there anything I can do to recover the data? I have the encryption key and password to BitLocker, it's just no longer showing up. Recovery programs don't seem to show anything (probably because any data I have is on an encypted but hidden partition). I really hope I can fix this. I'm happy to pay for data recovery as the information held is of great sentimental value to me, not to mention thousands of hours of work files that I have no backup of.

Thanks!

Re: Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 8th, 2017, 7:17

Prepare a destination drive, download M3 bit loacker, provide your password/recovery key and do a deep scan for your patient drive.
Good luck

Re: Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 8th, 2017, 19:22

Unfortunately, M3 Bitlocker can't seem to find the partition. The D: drive M3 finds is the new, empty one. It can't locate the Bitlocker partition. I'm trying TestDisk to recover it, but if anyone else has any advice for recovering a partition I'd appreciate it.

Re: Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 8th, 2017, 19:57

Data Recovery on a Damaged Hard Disk Encrypted with Bitlocker:
http://woshub.com/data-recovery-on-a-damaged-hard-disk-encrypted-with-bitlocker/

How to Recover Data From a Disk Encrypted by Bitlocker:
https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-recover-data-from-disk-encrypted-bitloker.htm

Contrary to the advice in the above articles, I would refrain from running CHKDSK against the clone (CHKDSK probably wouldn't see the file system in any case). Just run data recovery software against the decrypted data.

Re: Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 16th, 2017, 17:41

"...When I switched my computer back on again I used Windows Disk Management to allocate space to the drive..." Being a complete newcomer, I have a question:
Would allocating space to the drive change the original partition setup (wherever such is stored) to a different partition setup? If yes, would the OP have to use something like MiniTool Partition Magic version 9 to restore the original partition, then maybe that partition would yield the folders and files?

Re: Recovery of BitLocker Partiion

July 16th, 2017, 17:49

The partition table would be located in sector 0 (MBR). However, the OP erased the start of the user area and then formatted it again. Therefore simply restoring sector 0 would be of no avail.
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