This is for my son. He accidentally used the Windows Media Creation tool to create a Windows 10 bootable USB with his external m.2 SSD adapter drive. He had all his data on that drive and when he looks at it in Windows, it shows up as a 32GB drive with the rest of the 2TBs as "unpartitioned" space. He really needs to recover as much data as he can from that drive.
You could try something like Active@ Partition Recovery, either from Windows or else from a boot disc like Active@ Boot Disk which contains said Partition Recovery.
https://www.r-studio.com/ This is the tool that many professionals use to do data recovery, I've not used it myself, in fact I've never bothered doing any recoveries as I always have backups and as for other peoples recoveries, I've only ever needed Recuva as mostly I am recovering media - videos/photos/music and not documents/apps etc.
i'm with Glenn r-studio is probably one of the best recovery software for undoing partions deleted or changed that's provided the drive has not had too many files overwriting the original data. Confusios saying (paraphase) "always remove drives with important data otherwise egg on face"
OMG!!!! I mean WOW!!!! I just had a situation where I wasn't paying attention and deleted over 500 files from a 14 TB drive by mistake, when I meant to move them. And directly deleted them without going through the recyle bin. Ontrack Easy Recovery had been my go to back in the day, and had used it quite successfully. I've been fortunate and not needed such an app in quite awhile. I had it installed, so I tried that. Not a good experience. Apparently, the version I had installed, the latest we had, couldn't handle a drive of that size, and it didn't know it couldn't. I started it up and went on my merry way. Even though I specified the folder I knew the files had been in, so it wouldn't waste time looking where it didn't need to, when I came back much later, I found that it had estimated that it would take over 2 hours to scan for recoverable files, but it had already been running for over 4 hours (with 1 second remaining). I went away again for a couple of hours and when I came back it had stopped saying it had found some damaged sectors and helpfully offered to refer me to a lab for professional file recovery. I told it to ignore that and recover anyway. It started back up, still trying to search for recoverable files, and estimated it would take over 178 hours more. So I threw in the towel for that app. To be safe, and to confirm if I had any bad sectors on the drive I needed to avoid, I restarted Windows 10 in safe mode and ran chkdsk telling it to fix any errors it found and to check for bad sectors. To do this on the 14 TB drive took over 15 hours, and it found no errors and no bad sectors. So I restarted Windows 10 in regular mode and installed R-Studio.Network_v9.3.191230. It took about 1 minute to find the recoverable files in the folder that I knew they were in. After staring at the screen in amazement for a few minutes, it took another 2 minutes to recover the files onto another disk. I know what I will use in the future if I ever have need for such an app again. WOW!!! EDIT: Actually, it wasn't as good as I originally thought. Several of the files "recovered" ended up of zero size. But I was able to reacquire the files with other means (found another source and re-downloaded). Regardless, the speed with which R-Studio worked still makes it a no brainer.
Yeah data recovery is a tricky thing as most files are not sequential, meaning it has to rebuild the file from a often corrupted journal or table... it's not so bad when it's a small file, but once your into ISO's etc, it wont ever do a great job, but as you said, even having file names is handy as you can often source them again, but only if you know what your missing.
