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In the Windows Installer's Partition Manager I hit "delete" on the two logical partition reserved for the system (the first is the ~100 MB which was created by windows and the other was the rest of the physical drive allocated for windows files and other stuff).

After that, I hit "new" on the unallocated space (the whole physical capacity of the SSD). Than after the new OS was booted I ran a quick format on it from the File Explorer.

Before doing all this, I selected everything on my Desktop (on old OS install), and copied everything to a backup folder. After I installed the new OS I realized that it hasn't copied the files, but only links to the Desktop of the original files.

I haven't touched the drive so far, and as far as I know quick format only unassign the files, and the data remains. So I ran a dozen of undelete application so far, but non of them seems to find the files on the Desktop.

I managed to recover files deleted like this before. What should I check to get back my files?

The old OS is Win7 the new one is Win10, if that may matter.

EDIT: Could it be that the undelete apps only finds the MFT of the first partition?

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  • If you are talking about recovering program files then I think it won't be possible because they might have got overwritten by new windows 10 files and secondly you can't precisely know which files are are required by the application and where to place them.
    – Madhubala
    Commented Feb 6, 2020 at 23:05
  • I only want to recover some documents from the old Desktop, no program files needed.
    – Ferenc Dajka
    Commented Feb 7, 2020 at 6:42
  • @FerencDajka When you say "Before doing all this, I selected everything on my Desktop (on old OS install), and copied everything to a backup folder" so where exactly was the "backup folder" located which you copied everything before the change? Can you explain what method or specific backup copy operation you used when doing this copy to the backup folder (e.g. a backup software app, a manual copy and paste, a command like robocopy using specific parameters, a script, etc.)? Understanding how the backup operation was performed beforehand and what methods you used would be helpful to know.
    – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style
    Commented Feb 8, 2020 at 22:02
  • I just hit CTRL+A, CTRL+C on the Desktop, than CTRL+V in a folder on an other Drive (D:/SAVE/asztal [asztal means Desktop]). At least I remember that, really don't know how did I end up with Shortcuts.
    – Ferenc Dajka
    Commented Feb 8, 2020 at 22:06
  • Copying between different drives will always duplicate the files, which means they were shortcuts on the desktop to begin with. There might have been a shortcut hotkey which you pressed instead to force it to shortcuts (like holding ctrl+shift and dragging) by accident however.
    – QuickishFM
    Commented Feb 8, 2020 at 22:18

2 Answers 2

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This happened to me also in the past, which is one of the reasons that I never use Explorer to copy files if I can help it (besides the fact that it's the slowest). Explorer will "helpfully" decide to copy links to files on the desktop, rather than the files themselves, probably with the mistaken idea that the old files will always remain accessible.

You are now in the situation of having damaged your disk folder structure. You can only hope that the files to recover have not been over-written and can still be recovered,

Since you have done more than one operation on the disk, the chances for restoring the old folder structure may be slim, but you should still try to recover the folder structure. This is because contents-oriented recovery programs will find so many possible files or file-fragments, all without file or folder names, that it will be very hard to locate your files.

You will need to try out third-party products to try and recover, first the folder structure, if an old copy of the Master File Table (MFT) is still to be found, then the files themselves. Avoid writing to the disk while recovering.

Products that try to recover an old MFT

The products below will try to use an old MFT before searching the disk for files. If an MFT is found, the recovered files will have the right folder-name and file-name and size (content is not always correct).

Other recovery products

You will find more products and reviews in the article
Best Free Data Recovery and File Un-delete Utility.

Your only choice (besides abandoning) is to try these products one-by-one in the hope that one of them will find your files. I have unfortunately done exactly that a couple of times in the past, and I found that MiniTool gave me the best results.

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  • Well I tried a few of these programmes, but none of them seems to find my files. I am giving up I think. I suppose the different version of windows doesn't really matter right?
    – Ferenc Dajka
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 8:21
  • The version of Windows under which the tools are run does not matter. However, unless you did a deep/slow format, at least the data-scan tools should have found something, even if these specific files couldn't be located among all the found fragments.
    – harrymc
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 8:49
  • Sure thing, they seem to find the same files: a lot of useless files in temporary folders, example files for god know what and maybe a few files I can actually remember I had some day. Nothing recent ie tound though. And of course I have thousands of raw files with names of file000000001.xlsx , which cannot even be opened.
    – Ferenc Dajka
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 9:09
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    If none of the tools can restore the folder structure, then unfortunately all the copies of the old MFT were overwritten. The reason is apparently because two formatting operations were done, when most of the above products can only recover after one operation. If you can't locate your file among these file-fragments by its size or other attributes, then this is a lost cause.
    – harrymc
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 11:41
  • Well I would gladly do it, but shouldn't I accept an answer that actually resolved my problem?
    – Ferenc Dajka
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 15:51
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Well i think you should try Stellar data recovery or disk drill or easeus data recovery

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