Ext hrad drive was turned into a bootable device and I lost 25 years of data

[dabdella]

I downloaed a bootable repair tool from HP last night and put it onto my external WD Hard drive. Went to use it to reboot and older laptop it didnt work. I hooked it back to my desktop to delete the program and found 25 years of my families pictures, movies, life were all gone. I spoke with WD and they said the program turned my external hard drive into a bootable device. I am praying there is a way to reverse that?

[WAWood]

@dabdella 

Since this just happened, the chances of recovering the data from your drive are very good.

All you will be able to recover at best from the drive is personal data. You will not be able to recover settings, website information (including user accounts and passwords) or applications.

You will also need another drive large enough to hold the files and folders you want to recover because you can't recover them to the old drive.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Download and install this utility on a working PC http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
2) Connect the old drive, the one with the files and folders you want to recover, to the working PC
3) Connect something to that PC to hold the recovered files
4) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.
If that tool does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the demo version is free https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

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In your case, I heartily recommend the last product and last time I checked, it cost around $50 USD.