HDD GURU FORUMS

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!

Jm3 wrote: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

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

Jm3 wrote: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!

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!