Files overwritten by files that are not there

Recuva
1

Hello

I used to use my external HDD for back-up purposes, however I found a better solution and so removed all the data from the HDD. Now I use it to record video files to.

In the last couple of days I messed up whilst trying to partition the drive, and ended up removing all the video files from the drive. So I downloaded Recuva to try and solve this problem.

The issue is that when Recuva did a search, it only found all the old backed-up documents and none of the video files. To make things even stranger it says that some of the backed-up files (which I do not need any more) have been overwritten by these video files, yet the HDD is completely blank? It clearly shows that Recuva is detecting the video files that I want to get back, right?

I feel it may have something to do with the partitioning. I created the original partition with the video files still on the HDD (silly I know, but I cut corners because there was a good 100-150GB of video files). It created a smaller partition in the HDD but then removed the partition with the video files in. In my haste, I deleted the partition I had created that caused the issue and renamed the whole drive back to (F:) and this is the state it is in, completely empty.

Any help greatly appreciated, if you need more details or pictures, feel free to ask :)

Henry

2

Hi Henry, and welcome to Piriform.

I'm not sure what help I can give at this stage, but it would assist if you could supply some more info. Which operating system are you using, and what did you use to partition the drive?

Usually, providing that there's sufficient space for a new partition and the files which are already there, then a good partitioning program will move the files around and create the space for the new partition. That's my experience anyway.

This seems to have happened recently, so have you actively used the drive since, and have you carried out any kind of formating?

My first thought is to try and undelete your original partition and maybe recover some files in the process, but it sounds like there may have been some overwriting by the partitioning operation, which won't have helped.

Besides the info asked for above, can you give us a screenshot of what "Disk Management" shows for this drive?

And when you scanned with Recuva did you have "Scan for non deleted files" selected in "Options\Actions"? If you didn't, try another scan with Recuva with that box checked.