Hi. Bought SSD to upgrade wife's laptop and accidentally deleted her operating system drive :'(

[nitroburn1972]

Hi. Bought a dual-bay sata docking station recently to recover files from some of my older hard drives. Found out it also was useful for cloning drives...yay me. Wife's laptop was being slow lately, so after all the usual cleanup, checks, performance setting tweaks, I decided to buy her another stick of Samsung 8gb ram to replaced her second stick of 4gb. I also got her a 1tb Crucial SSD. Got everything ready (was rushing of course, because I wanted to have it working for her before she went to sleep tonight) and cloned the drive...only to find out I cloned the new, empty, SSD TO her operating system drive with all her photos, files, etc.. Major screw up. 😞 She'd just recently upgraded her Windows 8.1 to Windows 10...then this happens. Is there any solution to restore her drive and Windows...even purchase a recovery disc from HP...or am I stuck with having to purchase Windows 10 from Microsoft and start her computer from scratch reinstalling all drivers and updating bios and such? We never made recovery disks or backups. Any help or hint of some magic would be welcome. Hoping I don't have to suck it up and purchase Windows 10 outright. Thanks in advance. 

[nitroburn1972]

Did some Googling and, I believe, I'm okay with simply downloading Windows 10 again and it'll register fine. So I guess I'm on the right track with using recovering software to get her files back. Hopefully nothing was overwritten with actual data and all files will be recoverable. Just a Lot more work than I'd originally planned (lol)...it was supposed to be so simple... 😂

[ieee488]

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@nitroburn1972 wrote:

t I cloned the new, empty, SSD TO her operating system drive with all her photos, files, etc.. Major screw up. 😞 

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All her photos and files are lost. Wow. If I was your wife, I would be majorly upset. 😲

Before you do anything remove the old hard drve so you can't do anymore damage than you have already done. 

Then do a clean installation of Windows 10. It should activate when you go online after the install.

[JaredXP]

I am pretty sure, unless he were to intentionally overwrite the drive, he cannot do much damage to it. He can recover most, if not all, of her files using recovery programs.

[WAWood]

@nitroburn1972 

Just because Windows does not "see" files and folders does not mean they are permanently lost.  There are applications that can find such stuff and retrieve them.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the disk drive from the old PC. If this is a SATA hard drive or a SATA SSD, this is a simple thing to do. 
2) If you have a desktop PC with a spare hard drive connector, then connect the old drive to that. If the old drive is a SATA drive, connect both the power cable and the data cable and an adapter. This adapter is illustrated below.

3) Try to retrieve the files and folders you want to save from the old drive and copy them to the new PC.

If this does not work, then you need 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) 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 trial version is free http://www.file-recovery.com/

[nitroburn1972]

Thanks. I'm trying. Immediately took out the drive last night, placed in into the external sata bay and attempted deep scanning with one program that took all night. I didn't find any files. 😞 Attempted to try PCI File Recovery (awkward menus) and Recuva and those two weren't able to scan the drive from what I could tell. Will keep searching for recovery software and keep trying. Luckily she mainly just had photos--most of which are probably copies of what her iPhone sends to FB and such...so really isn't much of a loss...lots of our cat pics. Lol.

[nitroburn1972]

Thanks for the reply. Before bed, I tried doing a Deep Scan (searching for any and all files) using PuranFileRecoveryx64. It didn't find any.

 

Recuva isn't isn't seeing the drive. Attempted to use PCI File Recovery and...well it's not the most intuitive to use. Will keep trying. Luckily she doesn't use her pc much, expect for cleaning out her phone every couple years. Think most of her photos she cared about were uploaded to Facebook albums already. Those that aren't...well, those are the ones we most care about since she taken most photos of the kids over the last few years.  Appreciate the assistance. Will look for the other recovery programs you mentioned and try all. 

[nitroburn1972]

EASEUS Data Recovery claims to be able to recover drive that's now RAW. Guess it's worth a shot? 

[WAWood]

@nitroburn1972 

I've not used the EaseUS tool, so I can't speak to its reliability but I have used the file recovery tool, and even though the Deep Scan can take HOURS to complete, I have found it to be the most reliable.

[nitroburn1972]

Yeah. It ran all night and into this afternoon--only to show no files. Am going to pass on trying that Wase US tool, because it's gimmicky where they only allow you to see or find a couple Gigabytes...if you want to recovery everything one has to pay.  Trying TestDisk recovery tool now and I'll get results in a few hours. Thanks, again, for all of the help and suggestions.