Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Deleting large amounts of data from a hard drive by accident can be devastating. Recovery can be hard to impossible. Or easy, if you're prepared.
I have accidentally deleted everything inside my hard drive. How could I restore them?
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I've accidentally done this myself.1
It's never pretty and your recovery options are usually very limited.
Let me start with one admonition: stop using the drive. The more that you use it, the less likely that you'll be able to recover.
Now, let's look at options...
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Restore your most recent backup
The easiest solution is to simply grab the most recent backup that you took of that drive and restore its contents or restore the backed up copies of what you deleted.
In fact, it's exactly because of these types of scenarios that we take regular backups in the first place.
Once restored, you've only lost whatever has changed in the time since that backup was taken. If you're following a typically recommended pattern of some form of nightly backup, that means that you've lost at most a day's worth of work.
It's by far the easiest, most reliable, and quickest way to recover from this kind of problem.
You don't have a backup, you say?
Then the chances of a full recovery just got a lot smaller and the steps to try a recovery just got a lot more complex.
Seriously, stop using the drive
If this is your system drive, or "C:" drive, then I strongly recommend that you actually physically remove it and place it into an external USB enclosure.
You can then take it to another computer for the steps that follow. Alternatively, you can install a new drive in your computer, reinstall Windows onto that drive, and install any applications that you care to so that you can once again have a working machine.
The goal here is to stop using that original drive. Every time Windows writes to the drive, even when trying to boot, it's overwriting data that you might want to recover. The only way to make sure that it doesn't happen is to not try to boot from it at all or use it in any way. The safest way to do that is to make it the second or external drive.
Try recovery tools
With the drive attached as a second or external drive, grab the free data recovery tool Recuva and turn it loose on the drive.
Recuva, and other tools like it, scan the drive media looking for deleted, but possibly recoverable files, and allow you to specify which should be restored.
This could be a painstaking and time-consuming process. The problem is that file recovery tools don't know the difference between files that you just recently deleted by accident and files that you deleted before that on purpose. They'll identify all of the files which could be recovered and you'll need to see which of those that you actually want to get back.
I recommend that you not recover in place. By that, I mean rather than simply undeleting the files on the drive, copy the files to be recovered to a different drive. This should avoid writing to the original drive at all. The goal here is to minimize any changes to that drive until all of the files that you want back have been recovered.
Practicality
Most people won't do what I'm suggesting.
Most won't have backups. Most will simply reboot from the drive, if they can, and run recovery tools like Recuva to recover what they can. If they can't even boot, most will actually reinstall Windows on that drive, overwriting most of the data that they'd want to recover, and then try running recovery tools after.
And most folks will quite possibly lose much of the data that they'd accidentally deleted permanently.
(You can guess where I'm going with this...)
Don't be like most people.
To begin with, start by backing up. You can see how easy it is to restore from a backup compared to all of the steps required to - maybe - recover the deleted files directly.
And if you do find yourself in a situation where important files have been deleted and you have no backup to recover from, slow down and take the time to do it right. That'll significantly improve your chances of recovering what was lost.
1 For the curious, it was a Linux server that I was setting up and I accidentally typed "rm -fr *" at the root of the drive. For the non-Linux users, that's the remove command, with the force and recurse options, with "*" meaning everything. Fortunately, it was early in the process and I just started over.
Article C4932 - September 15, 2011
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
I looked into the various means of backing up data on my hard drive - an external hard drive, and decided on an off-site backup servce such as Carbonite or Mozy. My computer guru recommended Mozy and every night at 3 a.m., all the files I designated to be saved are backed up to be retrieved if and when needed.
Posted by: Mary Minshall at September 20, 2011 11:38 AMIf the hard drive was trashed, there may be another way.
While using Nero Vision to capture a DVD-RW, the app hung. I had to turn off the computer using the power switch. I put the HD in a USB case and found that both the W7 and logical partitions were unidentified file systems. And there were two additional partitions that should not be there.
I tried repairing with W7 install DVD. NG. Used Easy Recover app in a PE disk that has worked in the past. It did not see all files, but those it recovered were damaged. None of the .mpg files would play.
Used TestDisk 6.12. I attached to the PATA in another computer because TestDisk did not see the disk when in USB enclosure.
I opened testdisk_win.exe and chose the advanced mode. It found the hidden W7 boot, the labeled logical partition, and two unlabeled invalid partitions. I used the cursor keys to select the W7 and set it to as the boot partition. I set the logical to logical, and the two invalid partitions set for deletion.
All files were readable and good when viewed XP.
I put drive back in the original computer, and all worked again.
Posted by: ron at September 20, 2011 1:56 PMI run Windows 7 Ultimate and Kubuntu Natty in a duel-boot configuration. I'm forever messing around with my OSes and occasionally have had to pay the price with an unbootable system. I've lost count of how many times I had to reinstall my operating system(s). No biggie, though, as I always have my personal files backed up to my portable hard drive so other than the time I used for reinstalling/reconfiguring my OSes, nothing was lost. Sometimes I just get bored and trash my OS for fun so I can reinstall. PS: who in the world would ever include the wild card with the rm command? That's a rookie mistake. :-)
Posted by: Tom R at September 20, 2011 11:05 PMSeagate has excellent recovery software and they have technicians to help. It is not free but the extra bucks are well worth it. Also buy another portable hard drive to write the scanned files to. Memory sticks are slow.
Posted by: Dale at September 21, 2011 8:35 PMDale
Leo wrote:
And that, my dear Leo, is why I set my Unix prompt to display my current working directory. :)23-Sep-2011
Posted by: Glenn P. at September 23, 2011 4:54 AM