Hi all, first post here and really hoping someone can help as I have an unexpected issue this evening.

I've got an old laptop with a 1TB SSD which has three partitions (Windows 10, Windows 11 Insider and my data) that I'm using to run Windows Insider builds on. The laptop still has a load of my pics, documents, (basically everything saved on it from many years of it being my main laptop) as I haven't got around to fully transferring everything to my new one. Anyway I installed the latest Windows 11 Insider build and it has completely trashed my separate Data partition where I store a "home" folder which has all my pics, movies, documents and so on. It now shows as a RAW drive and I can't see anyway to get my data back, nor do I know if it's still there?

I have looked online and seen people suggest TESTDISK, and I am running that currently on the laptop to see if it can recover this partition, but it is taking an age - looks like it will take a day or two at this rate, and that's just the analysing. Plus I'm not sure if there is a better method I should be using?

Is my data likely gone on this partition? I do have a system image backup from when I had just one 1TB partition from 2022, but ideally I'd like to restore the E: partition as it was just a few hours ago this evening. If TESTDISK works, would it restore the file system and folders as they were?

I should also add, that the Drive E was showing and working fine after the latest Windows Insider build installed - then something happened; I've just looked through the event log and seen three NTFS errors/warnings:

1) Volume E: (\Device\HarddiskVolume7) requires an Online Scan. An Online Scan will automatically run as part of the next scheduled maintenance task. Alternatively you may run "CHKDSK /SCAN" locally via the command line, or run "REPAIR-VOLUME <drive:> -SCAN" locally or remotely via PowerShell.

2) A corruption was discovered in the file system structure on volume E:.

The Master File Table (MFT) contains a corrupted file record. The file reference number is 0x100000000002c. The name of the file is "<unable to determine file name>".

3) The file system structure on volume E: has now been repaired.

These are from around 8PM this evening, which was around the time when I first noticed the partition had gone.

Just to clarify also, I know the dangers of installing Windows Insider builds, but I've never had data loss issues before, and as said above, it was definitely still working OK after installing the latest build - the entries in the Event Viewer show something must have happened but not sure what.

Thank you so much for any help and advice! Would be over the moon if somebody could help me restore my partition.

Alex

I've answered this on reddit.

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