@voltronic My current setup is run entirely off one single 1tb WD drive. My old drive died a painful screeching death years ago. I have my laptop which was my 'backup' of sorts, but it's missing a lot of stuff. I think I have ~1 month of stuff missing, and even then it's only of things like my art and music projects. I really should have invested in at least a secondary for storage.
@glassramen
So you used the term "corrupt". That can mean more than one thing. Are you saying it won't boot? If so, it might only have a corrupt boot sector which can often be repaired, giving you access.
@voltronic Couldn't boot, and when I booted into the win installer (yes I know, I'd stick to some flavor of linux if I didn't rely on windows for certain things) it showed a single partition that was in mbr. It was originally set with two main parts with the usual two additional sys ones. Had to delete the part and install fresh. I'm 100% accepting I might have jumped the gun on the reinstall and probably could have done a bit more if I made a new puppy usb drive or other bootable distro.
@voltronic My bet is I did something at some point without realizing it. Not quite sure, but I'll just deal with the consequences if so.
@glassramen
No judgement on OS here; I'm a solid Windows user because Linux doesn't support the hardware and apps I rely on.
I'm afraid that the moment you deleted partitions, you made data recovery much more difficult.
In the future, have this boot disk on hand, and use the Boot Repair utility for MBR problems.
You could try the PhotoRec utility on there to see if it could get any of your data. It's not just for photos.
@voltronic Yeah I recognize I made some poor decisions in reaction to the situation. I'm going to see if there are any files that are recoverable. I'm fine with parting ways with most of my data, just a couple things I'm hoping I can manage to pull out of the ether.
I'm also reliant on some software that linux doesn't support, and compatibility layers don't give me much confidence.