Recovering My Music Production Files: A Cautionary Tale

Hello everyone,

Today, I want to share a challenging experience I’ve had with my external hard drive and seek your advice on how to recover my valuable files.

I own a 1TB external HDD that has been my creative companion for the past 1.5 years, housing countless personal music production projects, including Ableton Live sets and audio files. Unfortunately, during a recent Windows reinstallation, the partition table on my drive was inadvertently overwritten. As a result, Windows is now only recognizing a 30GB system partition, leaving approximately 889GB of data inaccessible.

Here’s a brief recap of what transpired:

1. I mistakenly installed Windows on the external drive intended for my music projects.
2. I then copied a small file, about 250MB, onto the drive.
3. In an attempt to recover my data, I utilized Panda Data Recovery, but it’s possible that this action may have inadvertently altered the disk.
4. I also attempted to create a disk image using Macrium Reflect, but encountered an error stating “Unable to match partition.”

Despite these setbacks, I have hope that my files are still intact, merely hidden due to the corrupted partition structure. I’m reaching out to this community for guidance and support. If anyone has suggestions for effective recovery methods or tools that could help me access my data, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you in advance for your assistance! Your insights could be invaluable as I navigate this daunting situation.