Windows 8 Media Creation Tool Wiped My External Hard Drive Partitions!

[Angela V]

The other day, I attempted to make a Windows 8 Recovery USB using my external hard drive and the Media Creation tool. I specifically made a new partition for this process, as I had two other partitions on it with data. Making sure that the partition that was empty was selected, I successfully created the media. I couldn't get it to boot, however, and when I looked on the hard drive, its erased and merged my other two partitions, turning them into unallocated space, and the G: partition was the recovery drive.

I don't want to touch the recovery partition, because I don't want to screw anything else up.

Please help, I had a lot of important files on there and I'm not sure what to do.

 

[kemical]

Hi Angela,
I've never heard of anyone using an external drive before as normally one uses a USB drive. You could well have lost the dat a unfortunately. If you took it along to a professional company they might be able to save some data but only at some cost to yourself and it's not always certain what they can save. It might just be worth putting it down to experience

 

[nmsuk]

Firstly unplug the drive, then download undelete free replug the external drive point undelete at it and if lucky it may find your deleted files. Hope it helps but is a long shot.