External Hard Drive lost after Making a Windows 10 Bootable USB

Question

I have two issues; 1st: I lost all my data on an external hard drive after creating a bootable USB for windows 10 installation via windows media creation tool

2nd: I only can see 30 GBs out of my 1TB hard disk.

My question is, how to get all the storage available back? and is there any way to recover the data lost on the external hard drive?

Answer 1

What's on the external hard drive now? If it's only the Windows installation data, then I'm assuming you wrote to the external hard drive instead of another USB drive (or you intended to do that...).

Anyway, as long as you've only overwritten 30GB out of 1024GB hard drive, then there should still be about 994GB of the old data still there.

Recovering at least some of the old data should be possible, a recovery program like TestDisk, it tries to do things like:

TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

There's good documentation at the link above, including a Step by Step guide.

Or if TestDisk fails, you can always read the whole drive directly, looking for files to piece back together with PhotoRec. Recovered files might not have their original names or be in the any directory trees, but at least you can get some of the data back.

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Recovering the drive capacity should be just a re-partition (new GPT/MBR) & re-format away. But don't do that yet if you want to recover any data.

Answer 2

1st: I lost all my data on an external hard drive after creating a bootable USB

The reason is due to Media Creation Tools need to format the disk first and then writes its Boot Record followed by its installation files. Do note that they specifically says to use empty USB stick and the contents will be wiped out.

2nd: I only can see 30 GBs out of my 1TB hard disk.

how to get all the storage available back?

You can use Disk Management Console (DiskMgmt.msc) shipped with most new Windows to reallocate the space. I suspect that the Media Creation Tools only format and allocate 30GB partition. Reallocating the space however may affect the Window's installer and render it useless (not bootable) - I havent tried though.

is there any way to recover the data lost on the external hard drive?

No, not out of the box.. you had to rely on third party recovery tools.

Answer 3

Open Disk Management Console (click DiskMgmt.msc on win+r) click on the HDD and delete the Windows installation data and partition. Then click on the unallocated data and activate it.