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Using a cloning tool to move my hard disk drive’s data to another drive, I saw some weird, unnamed partitions that I thought were unnecessary and/or malware... And very confidently, proceeded to erase them. Now my computer won't boot.
Because at the moment I thought it wasn't supposed to be there, I didn't pay a lot of attention to what the partitions names were, they were about 4 or 5 of them.
I know my information is safe, so I have that going for me at least; I just don't know how to fix this ridiculous mess that I've gotten myself into.
The only two partitions remaining are the main C: and the default recovery partition.
WestWindsDemon
Posted 2018-08-27T21:40:12.527
Reputation: 37
2Edit your questions and indicate which partitions you deleted exactly. – Ramhound – 2018-08-27T21:42:12.513
3Unfortunately, you have probably put yourself in an unrecoverable state. Without knowing what partitions were there before, it's very unlikely to be able to get it working again. It's possible that your data might still be in the remaining partitions in a state you can access using a Ubuntu LiveCD or similar. If you boot into one of those, you might be able to copy your files to an external disk. – Christopher Hostage – 2018-08-27T21:57:48.957
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“Using a cloning tool to move my HDD to another, I saw some weird, unnamed partitions that I thought were unnecessary and/or malware...” I’m sorry to say that while the answer KiLL3Rw0lF has provided might help you recover your system, you really need to face the reality that the data is gone. I know telling someone about the importance of backups after the fact is really not pleasant, but situations like this are the reason why backups are critically important. Sorry about this but not much else can be said.
– JakeGould – 2018-08-27T23:25:29.0102If the answer provided below doesn't fix your predicament, you may be able to use that same disk cloning app to move the data in your C: drive to an external storage device, use a Windows installation disk to delete all the partitions, reinstall Windows, then clone the data in C: back to your disk. I have been in similar situations before, and thankfully had a full image backup from which to restore my mistake. And FWIW, you should have at least 4 partitions: EFI, MSR (Microsoft Reserved), data/system, and WRE (Windows Recovery). – BillDOe – 2018-08-27T23:34:29.563