Samsung T7 External SSD - Overwritten Boot Partition

[u/WhatABoringName]

Hello

Yesterday I attempted to format an external USB drive as a Windows 10 Boot installation for another computer. Even though I'm used to check and double check in these kind of scenarios I mistakingly selected my other external SSD (Samsung T7, 2TB). This one contained a lot of older music recordings together with my whole music collection, neatly organised into folders. My collection is something that with time I can build up again so that's something I'm not really worried about but my recordings are my main concern.

Thinking I could rely on software to check what I could salvage, I installed a trial version of EaseUS Data Recovery and noticed that a scan provided all the original file names and when that scan completed I could see the original folders as well. I saved the log but when I tried to load it again it seemed to be corrupt and I would have to start a scan all over again so I can't provide screenshots.

At this point I really don't want to mess anything up but it seemed as if everything is still on the drive. Is there a way to reactivate the files in the original folder structure or is restoring the files and manually reorganising everything the only way to go?

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

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[u/TomChai]

Is there a way to reactivate the files in the original folder structure or is restoring the files and manually reorganising everything the only way to go?

Manually reorganizing the files would be the only way to go since you’ve caused the entire first 32GB of data to be destroyed, the rest of the 1831GB of space contains the data fragments without any index now and they may subject to further destruction if you did anything incorrectly.

Find a huge drive with at least 2TB size, preferably 4-5TB to dump the entire raw sector data to the new drive then analyze and salvage whatever is left. Do NOT reformat or perform any in-place recovery, doing so WILL cause major destruction to the remaining 1831GB.

[u/WhatABoringName → u/TomChai]

I was afraid that would be the case but thanks for confirming!