Creating recovery flash drive did not recognise thumb drive

[WW101]

I am setting up a brand new desktop. Followed HP procedure to create an emergency startup thumb drive (would not accept cd). The procedure wiped my external hard disk containing approx 1TB of work related reference material. This external hard drive is now labelled as G with 21.3 GB free of 31.9 GB and when opened is "empty".

The thumb drive still contains the files that were already present and has not been touched.

How can I recover my 1TB of reference material and create a recovery cd/dvd/thumb drive?

If this is not possible, one computer destined for the bin

[Flower_Bud · Accepted solution]

Hi @WW101,

Thank you for posting on HP Forums,

Flower_Bud is at your service.

As I understand, you're in need of support.

No worries, as I'll be glad to help you, that said, I'll need a few more details to dissect your concern & provide an accurate solution:

Was there any error message while creating Recovery Media? 

Where you creating and saving recovery media on your personal hard drive (which you included your data)? 

Copying the recovery partition uses more than 16 GB of space and requires a large capacity USB drive.

Please refer to the article and follow steps to create Recovery Media.

Keep us posted!

Cheers 🙂

[mdklassen]

> This external hard drive is now labelled as G with 21.3 GB free of 31.9 GB and when opened is "empty".

Ouch. 

The process deleted all the existing files, and then created a 32GB partition, and wrote 10.6 GB into the partition.

From a command-line prompt, enter   DIR  G:  /S /A   and press  ENTER.

That '/A' option will show all the "hidden" files, which occupy that 10.6 GB.

> The thumb drive still contains the files that were already present and has not been touched.

Good.

> How can I recover my 1TB of reference material ?

The important point is that most of your data is still stored on the blocks on the disk-drive.

Compare to having a book of recipes, but the Table Of Contents has been removed/deleted.

All the recipes are still there, if you linearly scroll through the book, to rebuild the Table Of Contents,

and to "sew" multiple-page recipes back together ("recipe starts on page 11, and ends on page 14").

There exist "File Recovery" computer programs, e.g., RECUVA: http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

that can "walk" through every block of the disk-drive, and try to "recover" your files.

So, buy another 1TB external disk-drive, and designate it as a "target" for RECUVA to write the "recovered" files.

Launch RECUVA, and let it do its work.

When it finishes, and you are happy with the result, then you need to delete that 32GB partition, and create a 1TB partition, to "repurpose" the external disk-drive for future usage.

> and create a recovery cd/dvd/thumb drive?

Buy another 16GB thumb-drive, probably less than $8 US, insert it into a USB socket, then launch that "recovery media creator" software, and point to this new thumb-drive.

If you have multiple USB ports on your computer, you might need to try a different USB port.

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[Barachiel]

Hi @WW101 ,

Thank you for responding,

It's great to have you back 😉

It looks like you were interacting with @Flower_Bud, but she is out for the day & I'll be glad to help you out, 
I'm the Barachiel & I'm at your service.

Thank you for the update,

I appreciate your time and efforts, 

I'm glad you found the solution for this concern.

You've been great to work with and it has been a genuine pleasure interacting with you.

I hope both you and your product works great and remain healthy for a long time 😉 

To simply say thanks for my efforts to assist you, please click the "Thumbs Up" button to give me a Kudos.

And select Accepted as solution to help others find the same solution as you have.

Take care now and do have a fabulous week ahead. 🙂