3TB drive cleaned using DISKPART: Recovery

After accidentally cleaning and formatting my 3TB drive with DISKPART trying to make a windows 7 USB installation, I have fallen on the option of using Recuva to recover my drive, I have ran through it once and it found a lot of files, although, since I made a new partition they are unnamed, which is not a problem I will sort through all 3TB.

Now my problem is the partition I created is not fullsize, instead of 3TB it is 2TB and I do not know how to change the partition to full size using DISKPART without potentially messing my data even more.

What I have done....
- Used DISKPART to clean drive accidentally
- Formatted, but stopped immediately
- Created a new partition and formatted it (Bad move, now everything is a mess)
- Now I am using Recuva but I cannot get to all my files because Recuva will only search the 2TB section of my 3TB drive, hence I need to make a fullsize partition to have it done correctly

Where do I go from here? How do I change this so I can have my other 1TB back? The 'table of contents' for the files are already lost, so I don't need to preserve that. Or perhaps there is a better program that will search the depths of the unallocated space? Any suggestions to put me the right way would be great.

Hi

Since you've done a few different things that performed write operations on the disk, you can try a paid solution. (If you check my other threads here you will see that I only suggest paid solutions as a last resort )

In your case I would attempt using Restorer Ultimate. Download the demo at...
http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/download.shtml

and follow the instructions to have it scan the whole disk and be sure to check "Raw File Search" here are some help files...
http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/help/

When it is done (it will probably take a few hours) see if your original partition is listed. If it is then check the box next to it and choose next, you may see everything like it was originally.

If it is all there, you'll need to pay (I think $30, I already own it so I'm not sure what the price is now). You will also need a separate disk to recover the files to. Do not write anything to the disk that you are recovering from.

If you try this, let us know if it works or not.

James

No no, I've already used the very free TestDisk to verify that the partitions are invalid/gone. I overwrote the old partition, there is no way to get that information back and I realize this.

My only question is how would I go about partitioning the drive so I have full capacity again... I only have access to 2TB and I've tried remaking the partition with no luck and I didn't want to mess with it anymore. I've already done a 24hr+ deep scan with Recuva (which I highly recommend, completely free) and I have gained access to 2TB worth of files, albeit improperly named using numbers. I can sort through this. What I want is access to the other 1 TB worth of files, so what I need is a way to make the partition full size again so Recuva can recognize it and therefore recover my other files.

No no, I've already used the very free TestDisk to verify that the partitions are invalid/gone.

I do not understand what you mean. I said nothing about TestDisk. Is there something that I am missing here?

You can not see beyond 2TB because of the changes that you made which can not be undone to Recuva's satisfaction. I can not in good conscience tell you how to do something destructive to a drive that you are trying to recover data from when non-destructive solutions may yet exist. Someone else will have to do that

Restorer Ultimate will often allow you to see into the past. To see partitions that once existed on the drive but are no longer there. Recuva (though it is an excellent program) can not do this.

James

EDIT: Since you seem to be familiar with TestDisk, have you tried PhotoRec which is included with TestDisk. It should allow you to scan the entire disk but you will get no filenames or directories. Just all files with their first LBA number used for their name. You can choose to recover only certain types of files. The reason that I suggest Restorer Ultimate is because it has a chance of allowing you to recover the filenames and directory structure.

I have already lost the filenames and directory structure, I overwrote the partition with another partition and I have heard is impossible to get it back.

But.. I know I am seeming really persistent on not trying new software, I'm giving the demo scan a whirl and just like the other scanners, and this was expected, I will have the results in about 24 hours.

I will let you know how it works out, thanks in advance.

EDIT: This is already looking promising, it is telling me so far it has found 454 NTFS directory entries. The directory structure is definitely still there, thanks again! I will give an update when it is done.

I have just finally received money in my paypal and I have bought the program after seeing all my stuff in the scan, however, the scan results were lost a couple of days ago due to a BSOD happening out of the blue (heh). Anyways, I will update this in another 20 hours when I have begun recovering stuff from it. So far it looks very promising.