Hello everyone,

Apparently I did something stupid, not even sure how it happened.

I was using this 1tb kingston nvme as main drive w windows 11 and all my files on my previous laptop. no protection/encryption/bitlocker. I just removed the drive to sell the laptop and didnt backup because I knew my data wold be safe there until I installed on the new laptop. Had done it before multiple times without issues.

Here is the fun part... The new laptop is a asus f15 w 2 nvme slots, came w 1x 500gb drive and a empty slot.

Before booting the laptop, I open it to check ram model (upgrade later) and took the oportunity to also install my kinston 1tb drive. Ok all good intil here.

Thing is, this came w linux debian (keep-OS) pre installed, and during first boot, it must have either formatted or messed w my 1tb efi boot partition/files.

I proceed and isntalled windows on the oem 500g drive and can see my 1tb in disk manager/diskpart etc but it shows only as one "unknow" health partition, and all options on disk manager are greyed out meaning I cant assign a letter to it... Tried a bunch of recover programs (inside windows) and nothing seems to list any files there...

Any ideas what I can try at this point? Thank you!

Probably partition was formatted in Linux file system (ext4 and so on), that's why it cannot be mounted in Windows.


It looks like no chances. I would bet all your data has been eaten by TRIM command after device was formatted in Linux.

Ouch .. thanks for explaining, that is probably what happened...

I was trying to recover the files (still in windows using different softwares) and found 19 superblocks, I read somewere its possible to recover them with a good success rate.

What would be the best approach to perform this? In windows? Maybe try booting from linix and do there? I have no idea never messed w it and those files are important, I appreciate any help!