I have been dual booting Arch Linux and Windows on two separate drives for the past year now. Recently, my Arch Linux drive ran out of space, so I bought a new ssd and used Clonezilla to clone my Arch drive into this new drive. However, for some peculiar reason, after Clonezilla fiinished, my windows OS ssd seems to have been wiped. I made sure multiple times that the source and destination drives were correct (took pictures, and wrote down the names, etc.) Using gparted, I can see all that is left of the windows OS drive is some Microsoft reserved partition (picture attached). I used grub to load into either windows or Arch. Now, if I try to load into windows, it says that it could not find the .efi executable for windows. Do I have any hopes of recovering my windows OS? I heard from someone that they were able to go into the windows command line and recover their files but I'm not sure if this applies in my case. Please let me know if I need to provide any more information (pictures, screenshots, etc.) and I'll try my best to get back as soon as possible! Thank you for your time!
I am sorry to hear that. Normally Clonezilla won't touch the source disk unless there are some bugs, or you choose the wrong source and destination disks...
From the picture you provided, it's weird since this kind of partition layout is not on a normal, new disk. I have no idea where it is from. Are you sure both disks you have now have the same partition layout?
Steven
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For some context, I have 4 drives.
1TB HDD for windows
1TB SSD for windows
256 GB SSD for arch linux (which was full and I was cloning FROM)
1TB SSD for arch linux (which was my clone destination)
I think clonezilla did it's job properly.
I think the problem may have been gparted.
I used gparted to expand the cloned partition to take up the entire new ssd (from 256 gb to the entire 1tb).
When expanding the partition, I might not have noticed some option that would end up formatting the windows C: drive. Unfortunately, I have no way of checking this as I did not save the log for that action, nor does gparted save logs automatically (to my knowledge). I'm not really stressing THAT much as most of my important files (games and such) are still safe on a separate hard drive.
Honestly, I can probably be fine by just reinstalling windows and going on from there, but I am wondering is there any way for me to get back all my files from that C: drive (about 300gb worth of whatever). The answer probably is no, but I would appreciate any guidance in the right direction (any other forums or resources!)
Thanks Steven!
Last edit: Abrar Habib 2024-03-17
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hello,
I have been dual booting Arch Linux and Windows on two separate drives for the past year now. Recently, my Arch Linux drive ran out of space, so I bought a new ssd and used Clonezilla to clone my Arch drive into this new drive. However, for some peculiar reason, after Clonezilla fiinished, my windows OS ssd seems to have been wiped. I made sure multiple times that the source and destination drives were correct (took pictures, and wrote down the names, etc.) Using gparted, I can see all that is left of the windows OS drive is some Microsoft reserved partition (picture attached). I used grub to load into either windows or Arch. Now, if I try to load into windows, it says that it could not find the .efi executable for windows. Do I have any hopes of recovering my windows OS? I heard from someone that they were able to go into the windows command line and recover their files but I'm not sure if this applies in my case. Please let me know if I need to provide any more information (pictures, screenshots, etc.) and I'll try my best to get back as soon as possible! Thank you for your time!
I am sorry to hear that. Normally Clonezilla won't touch the source disk unless there are some bugs, or you choose the wrong source and destination disks...
From the picture you provided, it's weird since this kind of partition layout is not on a normal, new disk. I have no idea where it is from. Are you sure both disks you have now have the same partition layout?
Steven
Some more images here
For some context, I have 4 drives.
1TB HDD for windows
1TB SSD for windows
256 GB SSD for arch linux (which was full and I was cloning FROM)
1TB SSD for arch linux (which was my clone destination)
I think clonezilla did it's job properly.
I think the problem may have been gparted.
I used gparted to expand the cloned partition to take up the entire new ssd (from 256 gb to the entire 1tb).
When expanding the partition, I might not have noticed some option that would end up formatting the windows C: drive. Unfortunately, I have no way of checking this as I did not save the log for that action, nor does gparted save logs automatically (to my knowledge). I'm not really stressing THAT much as most of my important files (games and such) are still safe on a separate hard drive.
Honestly, I can probably be fine by just reinstalling windows and going on from there, but I am wondering is there any way for me to get back all my files from that C: drive (about 300gb worth of whatever). The answer probably is no, but I would appreciate any guidance in the right direction (any other forums or resources!)
Thanks Steven!
Last edit: Abrar Habib 2024-03-17
The program "testdisk" might be able to do something for you, though the chance to get it back is very low.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Good luck.
Steven