Are my files "toast"?

[ballisticbrian]

Are my files "toast"?
Hi guys - is this the best forum to ask for help trying to restore a hard drive? Had something happen that wiped 3 separate drives in the same machine at once including my backup drive. There is a specific forum on the tool I'm using, "testdisk", but the only responses is the poor guy running it.

Any discussion is welcome, thanks.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there ballisticbrian,

That is really unpleasant.
What do you mean by wiped? Are those drives reformatted?

Is your OS drive one of the drives that were wiped? If this is the case, it may be a good idea to attach the drive to another, working machine as secondary ones.
How are the drives recognized by Disk Management? What happens when you use the data recovery tool? I believe you can check some other tools as well: https/www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893

It would be a nice idea to save all the recovered data on a separate drive, so you can avoid data being overwritten.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[ballisticbrian]

Thank you for your reply. I went away from my machine and put it in Sleep Mode for about an hour. When I came back, there was a blue screen for a few seconds and the PC crashed and came up saying it wasn't a boot disk. Both boot disks would not boot (normally there was a choice when booting up).
Started to look at my main boot disk as the other boot disk just had an operating system on it and no critical files. Put the boot disk in another PC and it's not detected in BIOS.
I had to purchase a USB > ATA lead and that enabled me to see it in Windows, but if you try to access it, it states "Disk is corrupt and unusable", also chkdsk refuses to run on it, "incorrect parameter" but it did enable me to run the partition finder tool "TestDisk". That's the stage I'm at now and Testdisk can find the NTFS partition and there is nothing on it except for files that were already deleted before the incident (mainly temporary internet files) and two empty directories.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Well, unfortunately, there's nothing much you can do.
You should either contact a data recovery company, if the data stored on it is extremely important or just try using different data recovery tools and hope that they would pick up more data than the one you've already used.

D_Know_WD