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ATI 2020 - Destination disk cloned to source disk by error.

Thread solved

Hello,
I'm that stupide... I've made an error using Acronis True Image 2020.
1. I had 3 external disks : 1 source (931.5GB) extracted from a HP laptop with 4 partitions and files and 2 potential destination disks empty and formated with 931.5GB NTFS partition.
2. I have choosed the wrong source and destination disks trying to clone the HP disk. My error was due that in Windows 10 Disk Manager, disks are numbered from 0 to 3 and in ATI 2020 disks are numbered from 1 to 4.
3. I wanted to clone disk 2 to disk 3 rearding to the Windows numbering.
4. But in ATI 2020 : disk 2 was 1 of the destination disk (1 partition of 931.5GB NTFS) and disk 3 was the source disk (4 partitions including the HP recovery partition, 2 reserved spaces, and the Windows Partition).
5. I launched the cloning without having realized right away my huge mistake.
6. ATI 2020 told me : partition agregation to match destination with source disk (in my case my 3 source partitions have been agregated to 1 not allocated partition).
7. When I realized my mistake : too late! My source HDD has now only one not allocated 931.5GB partition.
At this point : data on my source disk seem to be still abailable with a file recovery software and I noticed that the structure of my source disk seems to have been backed up by ATI 2020 in the folder "System Volume Information" in different files/subfolders (date/hours correspond to the cloning operation) : "//System Volume Information/FileProtector/ , WPSettings.dat , IndexerVolumeGUID , ... But I am not sure...
But the question is : how can I recover my original disk with all these possibilies : old structure seems to have been backed up (not very sure) and files seem to be present. The only thing is that the source disk or partition is in a non allocated state.
Thanks in advance for your answers.

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Update : With Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16.5, I am told : "NTFS partition found at offset 0x800 but could not be undeleted (0xa000101c)."

Will try other Disk/Partitions Manager Softwares. But I'm afraid to have to reinstall all my Windows HDD.

Jean-Pierre, welcome to these public User Forums.

If you made a backup of your Windows HDD before this cloning mistake, that would be your best and easiest way of recovering the drive and its partitions etc.

If you don't have such a backup, then use your file recovery software to rescue as many of your user files such as documents, images, etc as you can but then do a clean install of Windows to recreate the correct partition structure for the Windows OS on that drive.  You will need to reinstall all your applications that were lost by the same issue.

Unfortunately, these types of mistakes are all too easy to make, even for the most experienced of users and reinforce the need to always have good backups before attempting any form of clone or other partition management change.

Many thanks to you Steve,

That's what I feared... Doing a clean install of all the applications.

Anyway. It should teach me a lesson (not even sure... ;-) )

 

Jean-Pierre, sorry that there wasn't a better answer!  This is not a lesson anyone really wants to have to learn!