external hdd not showing after installing memtest86. What have I done?

[rituraj]

In order to use as a memtest boot drive, I created a 1.00GB partition called "memory test" with drive letter 'I' in my external hdd named "My Passport" (assigned letter "H"). For some reason, memtest86 didn't get installed and then I deleted the partition "I" in disk management tool for windows 7. But now there is a partition called "memtest86 (H: )" and "My passport" is nowhere to be seen whre I kept a lot of data. The new "H" drive is showing "448kB free of 1.38MB" in Windows Explorer while in the disk management tool, the memtest86 partition is appearing as a FAT partition with a size 931.48GB, that's the full capacity of the drive.

Did I accidentally format my main partition or is it not my fault? How do I recover my data?

Do I need to provide any more information? I could not upload the screen shots. It says "enter the URL of your image". Please help...

(Can I even use an external hdd for memtest86? It said use a USB flash drive.)

 

[tweakboy]

You shanked it most probably your data is gone. Should have put it on USB stick. Boot up

 

[Elixer]

First off, you should be installing Memtest86+, not memtest86.

Anyway, huh ? How exactly did you write the ISO to the HD ?
That is meant for either a CD/DVD or a USB flash drive, not a HD.

Get testdisk (free), and see if it can recover your deleted partition. Hopefully, you haven't made any writes on it after you deleted the partition.

 

[rituraj]

thanks. will try that


Posted from Anandtech.com App for Android

 

[rituraj]

First off, you should be installing Memtest86+, not memtest86.

Anyway, huh ? How exactly did you write the ISO to the HD ?
That is meant for either a CD/DVD or a USB flash drive, not a HD.

Get testdisk (free), and see if it can recover your deleted partition. Hopefully, you haven't made any writes on it after you deleted the partition.

I am running testdisk now. Recovery is running and it is showing an estimated time of 23hours+, so I guess its working (There were around 600-700GB of data). the interface was a bit non-intuitive for me, however following instincts led me to a screen showing things like....

Drive H: - 1000GB / 931 GiB <RO> - WD My Passport 0748
Partition Start End Size in sectors
P NTFS 0 0 1 15503636 0 40 1953458176 [My Passport]

Pass 1 - Reading sector 276102323/1953458176, 2080 files found
Elapsed time 3h31m25s - Estimated time to completion 21h18m34
jpg: 588 recovered
riff: 322 recovered
mp3: 200 recovered
mov: 100 recovered..... etc.
...
...
Stop


The numbers are made up, I am just indicating what's on my screen. Looks like it's working?
Thanks a lot for being there for me. Learned this the hard way.
Will update when it is complete..