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Uninstalled caused entire drive to be wiped?

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omninick
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Joined: June 9th, 2018, 12:51 am

Uninstalled caused entire drive to be wiped?

Post by omninick »

Not really sure what's happened, and I highly doubt that this mess can be cleaned up, but to summarise:

Installed rainmeter, decided the layout wasn't for me and I was better off with another software, tried to uninstall. Received an NSIS error on the attempt to uninstall, inspected the program, and the file size read as about 800GB. I imagine this was a result of me installing in the wrong area of a drive where it didn't belong, but I assumed because it would be reading my drive, that it made sense? I persisted with the NSIS error but couldn't get it to go, and then found that it executed when placed on my OS SSD and not the HDD. Finally got it to uninstall and then I restarted to go clean up the residual files, but when I did that, I found that those 800GB of files that were part of the program ended up being some pretty important files on my HDD. They're all gone now, and I didn't have the space anywhere for a backup and never anticipated this. My fault entirely for having not backed up, but I feel like the fact that this could have happened in the first place is an issue in itself. I don't imagine the application is designed with the purpose of consuming all of those files, and I genuinely don't know what I did that was so wrong and caused this. Is this an error on my part, or an error in the application itself? I checked the residual file data that I deleted post-uninstall and it didn't amount to the 800GB, not even close, so I assume the uninstall itself did it. Just posting this here in the hopes that I can get some clarity on whether this is actually a design problem or bug, or whether I was just a massive dumbass. Also, if there is any chance that I could restore the damage done here, I'm all ears. The stuff that got deleted was pretty important to me.
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SilverAzide
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Joined: March 23rd, 2015, 5:26 pm
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Re: Uninstalled caused entire drive to be wiped?

Post by SilverAzide »

I seriously doubt Rainmeter has anything to do with your issue; more likely you have a virus or a failing hard drive. But if you really want to restore all your missing data, you need to do a bunch of things right away. Your description seemed to indicate the deleted files were on NOT on your OS boot drive (an SSD) but were on a spinning disk drive, yes? If so, you are lucky (could be worse, if the deleted files are on an SSD, you are very likely hosed). Whatever the case, make VERY sure you stop writing to the drive with the missing data immediately. Pull the drive if necessary. Next, get a good virus scanner (or two) and make sure your remaining drives are clean. Buy a good file recovery utility. Run it against the damaged hard disk (all of it, including "unused space"), and if you have not overwritten parts of files, you might be able to recover most of your stuff. A proper recovery utility will want to place the recovered files on a different drive, so you need to have 800GB of space available on another drive. I'd suggest getting a USB 3.0/3.1 drive dock (that can dock bare drives), pull the bad drive and replace with a new one, then put the damaged drive in the dock for recovery purposes only. Once you have your data, you can repurpose the old disk if it is actually in good condition (like use it for a backup drive).
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