OOPS...

OK, so perhaps something can be learned from my mistake. I hope. That would be good.

What happened is that I had this large partition on my hard drive, about 300GB, and I had been saving data from my previous Windows installation upon it. Yeah, only I haven't had a need for anything on that partition for the past ten years, so I thought it would be a good idea to clean it up and recycle it for current use.

So, of course it turned out the partition did not want to be deleted. I won't go into the details about having to dismount it from the command prompt before I could do anything with it, but I knew it would be a little tricky, so i took precautions. I renamed all the folders and the drive so it would be easy to recognize, and I took careful note of the drive letter so I knew which one to format. Then, I restarted my computer into Safe Mode Command Prompt Only and dove in!

It seemed to be going well, at first. I was able to begin formatting drive E: without any issues at all. Wait.... No issues at all? It should at least have given me a warning about the drive being "in-use." The percent-done was still at zero when I hit ctrl-C and did a double-check. Drive C: was fine. Drive E: needed to be formatted (I had just interrupted that process). Hang on, I'm operating out of drive X:.... That means the letters have been changed due to being in the Command Prompt shell. I checked again, this time for drive D:, and there were the (normally) drive E: contents, still labeled to be deleted. So if D: was the old E:, then that meant....

Yes! I had, of course, reformatted my data drive, AKA drive F:, along with everything on it. Twenty years of important backups and personal information. All my irreplaceable documents, all of my game files, all of my work from university, all of my job history. p00f! Bye-bye.

Well, I have been considering a clean install of Windows 10... This would seem to be a good time for that. I have the time to work on it, now that work has been shut down for a month. Also, with nothing on my drive to lose, I may as well consider replacing my aging hard drives, too. In the meantime, I am trying to see what files I might be able to recover using various tools. That is going to take a while. It seems pretty clear what I need to do, and the order in which I need to do it, so I suppose I should get started.

Remember, folks: double check the contents of the drive you are about to erase so as to make certain it actually is the one you intend to erase. And play some games for me as I cannot. Shoot stuff, dodge stuff, go clicky-clicky with your keyboard. That, and take steps to back up your important data for when your hard drive catches fire.

[Let us hope we do not become part of a fallen order, like this guy, here.]

[EDIT: It seems I was wise enough to back up some of the important files in the cloud, and I am currently experimenting with two different recovery programs. I am still waiting for the new HDD I ordered to arrive so that I have something upon which to put the recovered files. This is probably going to take some time....]