Help... I've lost my book

Marie SWE said:

@Trebo58 I'm just thinking out loud here:
As it is an ST5000NM0084 a classic HDD 5TB 7200RPM disk. Then Trim isn't a bad guy.

As long the partition wasn't securely erased, or the partition was encrypted. it should be possible to extract the data.
Even if the partition was encrypted, the partition itself "should"(exceptions of the rules always exist) be possible to extract with a sector-by-sector scrape.
In this case i would do a sector-by-sector cloning of the whole disk and mount it as an image-disk to try extract the data from.
When working with a copy you never have to worry about messing up the original.

I do not have any good windows based tools to recommend for a recovery/forensic-cloning. Of free customer software i use is CloneZilla in advanced mode.
one of their guides: Clonezilla - Live Doc
but as always, it is good to read more of the documentation then just follow a guide, so you actually understand the software.

Why i just thinking out loud instead of trying to explain it all, is that i really-really suck at describing things on HowTo.
And this is why i know @jumanji is the man, as he is a God on explaining things and how it works
I'm sadly only a doer... not a teacher.

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spapakons said:

Exactly what we are trying to say. Forget fast and easy methods. He has to do a sector-by-sector scan of the whole disk (it will take hours) and then see if there are any useful data to recover. The quick methods are if the disk is fine but you accidentally deleted some files, not when you have lost the partition. And of course to give the tool full access rights, you must run it as Administrator, I thought this one was implied. As we say in Greek, "τα ευκόλως εννοούμενα παραλείπονται" (the easily implied are not mentioned).

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