W11 23H2 New Install - Deleted Partiton, how to recover?

When doing a clean install I accidentally deleted the partition on my D drive; none of the partitions on it have anything to do with windows (like boot or system) so this shouldn't be too hard?



I'm running testdisk deep scan on the drive and it looks like it will take days. Is there no faster way to find and restore lost partitions on non-windows drives?



(The drive in question is D)
On the install setup I think I probably formatted it, or deleted and formatted it, I dont know cause I was pretty careful but oh well..


So am I trying to find and restore a lost partition, or should I be looking at just deep scanning the drive with a file recovery program and grabbing as much data as I can?

The data recovery software will need to analyse and map the entire drive, so on a 2TB drive it will take while!

I am not aware of any quick partition recovery methods.

So, just to be clear: - You accidentally deleted partition D: leaving the space as 'unallocated'. Now you have reformatted that same 'unallocated' space to recreate partion D: and it is empty but you hope to recover the lost data that was on the original D: partitition? Is this correct?

If so then I think the data is lost and unrecoverable but may be a chance if using GPT instead of MBR.

You better use a third party data recovery tool such as Minitool Partition Recovery, GetDataBack and others. If you don't have a functional Windows installation, you can boot with a Windows live USB such as Sergei Strelec's WinPE here: WinPE 10-8 Sergei Strelec English » Sergei Strelec

It contains many tools to diagnose and repair your computer. Boot into the Windows 10/11 environment and then click on the Start button bottom right. Navigate to the Data Recovery section and launch an application. You must also have enough space to save any folders and files recovered. This normally scans the whole disk before allowing you to select what to recover, so it might take several hours for the initial scan to complete. Also any file recovered is copied with the disk working in the very basic "compatibility mode" which means it takes much more time than when copying normally from the disk. Be patient.

PS: If you just deleted the drive or made a quick format, most data should be there albeit some of them corrupted. If you did a full format, don't waste your time, all data are lost. Sorry for the bad news, but I am trying to save you the trouble of several hours of scanning for nothing.

I have been running easeus for about 6 hours:


It is almost like all the files have been wiped with DBAN or something. there was about 700gb of files on there. where did everything go? a simple partition deletion / format in the windows installer setup should not clear a disk like this.

>full format

I probably did 'format' in the win installer setup, which I think is just a quck format. Honestly I am like 95% sure I didn't even touch it because I am always very careful when reinstalling windows and make sure not to touch the wrong drives. Very confused.

A partition delete or quick install only makes changes to the table of contents of the disk. The data are still here but normal Windows applications don't find them because there is no entry for them at the table. The recovery applications ignore this table and scan the disk sector-by-sector to detect your data. That's why it takes too many hours for the scan to complete. Also I don't like when the application groups my data into "documents", "photos" etc. I prefer to see the original folder structure so I can go directly to the parts I want to restore. GetDataBack gives you the original structure, provided is not corrupted.