I have recently accidentally deleted the partition table on a Seagate BarraCuda 1TB HDD, and rebuilt MBR then created a new partition and (quick) formatted it, how did I do it?
I recently bought a Samsung 870 QVO 1TB SSD and during the process to partition it using DiskGenius I mistakenly chose the HDD (they have the same size)...
I have installed a working Windows 10 OS to it, and installed many programs, and I downloaded and stored many installers on it, its filesystem is NTFS and it spans entire HDD (minus a few megabytes occupied by EFI system partition) I wanted to migrate the installation to the SSD but now...
There wasn't filesystem corruptions, and the HDD contains no bad sectors, the HDD hadn't been written to since, so the data shouldn't have been overwritten, however the partition table and master boot record are gone, increases the difficulty of data recovery.
But I understand erasing the MBR and Partition Table only erase the index of the data, not the data itself, and quick format doesn't overwrite data, so theoretically and practically the data shouldn't be lost.
But of course, this process often costs a lot money, and I don't want to spend money just yet, and I don't know the reliability of the free programs I can find on the web, so what free (and preferably open source) data recovery program I can try to recover data after formatting and repartitioning?
I am using Windows 10 x64 though I have also installed Fedora 33 x64 to another disk.
In fact all the data stored in the partition are downloadable from the internet, however I don't remember fully what I have downloaded to the HDD, so I don't actually need to recover the files, but I need to view the list of the files.