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I recently bought a new SSD for a Linux Mint installation in order to avoid potentially messing up the partitioning of my existing drives. During the installation I seem to have mixed up the model names of my SSDs and ended up inadvertently re-partitioning my entire 500GB Windows boot SSD.

In essence, all my Windows partitions are now replaced with Linux partitions. I realized this after being unable to boot into windows, initially assuming it must have only been the boot partition that got messed up but no; it's the entire thing.

The silver lining here is that only the files of the Linux root directory have actually been written onto that drive. 'sudo blkid' does return two "Microsoft reserved partitions" so I am holding out hope that with the right procedure, Windows, along with my data can be properly reinstated.

(I am aware that this issue has been discussed to death all over the web. However, from what I gather, the correct solution to this is highly dependant on the exact nature of the issue. With my limited knowledge of cmd commands and Linux as a whole, I feel that blindly following generalized instructions can do more harm than good in this case.)

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  • According to Wikipedia: "No meaningful data is stored within the MSR". If everything else on that disk has been overwritten with Linux files, you are out of luck. Just to be sure, you could add the output of parted DEVICEFILE print to your question, where DEVICEFILE refers to that SSD. Software like Photorec may be able to reconstruct some of your Windows data, but I think your disk can be compared to a huge mosaic whose pieces where unstuck, partly replaced and thoroughly mixed. Hard to reconstruct the original image.
    – berndbausch
    Commented Apr 20, 2021 at 23:54
  • I might be missunderstanding this but isn't the repartitioning of a drive mainly the realocation of free space? Since the Linux install consists of merely 8GB compared to the 500 GB capacity, wouldn't it be possible that none of the windows data has been touched?
    – Jonas Görke
    Commented Apr 21, 2021 at 0:08
  • Of course, your data is still there to a large extent. Finding it is the problem. This is why I used the analogy of a mosaic. And as I said, try Photorec or similar software that has the purpose of recovering lost files.
    – berndbausch
    Commented Apr 21, 2021 at 0:11
  • Thank you, I shall take a look at Photorec. My main goal more or less is just to boot back into windows. Not too much of my important data is actually on that boot drive so the fix would be a bit moot if I had to end up resinstalling windows anyways. I'm mainly asking here because it would save me tons and tons of time.
    – Jonas Görke
    Commented Apr 21, 2021 at 0:19
  • Fixing it is very unlikely. Many of the data structures needed to maintain the data on the rest of the disk are probably clobbered. If you have nothing worth trying to recover at the file level, you might as well reinstall from scratch. Trying to reconstruct the boot data, OS data, file system data, and so on is far too much work without much chance of gain.
    – C. M.
    Commented Apr 21, 2021 at 11:33

1 Answer 1

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You're going to have a very difficult time of it. You could try recreating the original partitions, but if you've partially overwritten the filesystem you'll be very lucky to get data back.

This issue has been previously discussed at Accidentally installed Linux Mint over Windows/Ubuntu. How do I recover data (SSD)?

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  • Thank you for the reference. I have seen this discussion previously but was discouraged by the fact that in the references it recommends being proficient in cmd, which I am not. I might have to just bite the bullet and hardline it.
    – Jonas Görke
    Commented Apr 21, 2021 at 0:00

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