Accidentally ran "clean" in DiskPart on the wrong drive. Is it recoverable?

caper58

Hey guys, I made a stupid mistake. I was trying to wipe a USB drive using DiskPart, but I mixed up the disk numbers and ran the clean command on my secondary internal Western Digital HDD instead. Now the drive is showing up as "Unallocated" in Disk Management.
Did I just permanently wipe everything? Is there any way to recover the data without paying thousands for a recovery lab? Thanks in advance!

Judy

caper58

Good news is you almost certainly did not permanently wipe the data. Because the clean command in DiskPart only removes the partition table and volume signatures, it does not overwrite the actual data on the disk. So, it is possible to recover data. The very important thing is “Do not write anything to the drive”.

Then, you can use a partition recovery tool to restore the partition.

MattJosel

Hi there! First, your data is almost certainly still there! We have all made this exact mistake at some point.
The good news is that the standard clean command in DiskPart only deletes the the partition table of your

drive. It does not erase the actual files. Only the clean all command does a permanent wipe. Right now, your

files are perfectly safe, but Windows just doesn't know how to find them.

But THE CRITICAL RULE:
Do NOT initialize the disk, do NOT create a new volume, and absolutely do NOT format it in Disk Management. Doing any of these will actually start overwriting your data!

You just need partition recovery software. Download a reputable recovery tool to have a try. Good luck!