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December 29th, 2019 16:00

XPS 8920, HDD new volume, recovering data?

I just had a Dell technician replace a malfunctioning SSD in my XPS 8920. My system also had a 2TB HDD as its D drive which I stored all of my data and backups before the SSD was replaced. After the replacement I was given a fresh installation of Windows 10. Everything went smoothly, however I could not find my D drive in the directory.

I contacted my technician and may have misunderstood his instructions. In the Disk Management I found the 2tb hardrive and it said "unallocated." I right clicked it and clicked New Simple Volume, and now the D drive is detected in the directory however all of my data is gone.

Is there a way to recover the data or have I accidentally deleted it?

8 Wizard

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17K Posts

December 29th, 2019 21:00


@ericblc wrote:

In the Disk Management I found the 2tb hardrive and it said "unallocated."


At that early point, if all the space was already "unallocated" ... the drive was already erased. 

Retrieve the files from your backup.

4 Operator

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3.2K Posts

December 30th, 2019 05:00

@ericblc I am afraid that @Tesla1856 is correct that the 2TB hard drive ia erased. This is why when installing Windows, all other drives should be disconnected first.

7 Posts

December 30th, 2019 07:00

Hey guys.

Good news - I have successfully salvaged all of the important documents from the hardrive using a data recovery program. The hardrive had 13 years worth of photos and documents so I am very relieved that this program worked. It seems that the hardrive had been reformatted but my data had not been written over yet as I had not yet done anything new with the hardrive (windows still says it is completely empty).

Thanks.

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