I have a Windows 11 Pro PC with a 500GB NVMe system drive (C:) and a 2TB WD SSD (D:) that contained more than 500GB of personal, work, and video files. I restored a Windows System Image created about a year ago; the image only covered the system drive and did not include the files on D:. During recovery, "Format and repartition disks" was already checked and disabled, and I did not open the "Exclude disks" option. The restore completed and Windows booted normally, but afterward the secondary SSD appeared completely empty. Windows still detects it as a 1.82TB NTFS volume. A full physical scan with R-Studio found only about 16MB under Recognized4 and otherwise reported empty space, with no previous directory structure or evidence of the original 500GB-plus data. TRIM is enabled, showing "NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0" and "TRIM Supported." I am currently making a sector-by-sector image of the SSD onto a separate 4TB drive and am avoiding any further changes to the original. Could Windows System Image Recovery have formatted or repartitioned the secondary SSD even though it was not included in the backup? What else could explain this, and how does recovery behave when multiple drives are connected?
3 Answers
TRIM is especially concerning on an SSD. Once the restore or formatting operation caused the drive to receive discard commands, the controller may have cleared the underlying NAND pages, making older data impossible to recover even if the filesystem could otherwise be reconstructed. The R-Studio result does not prove exactly which operation occurred, but it does suggest that this was more than a damaged partition table. The safest explanation is that the recovery workflow selected the disk for formatting, while TRIM then made recovery far less likely.
Yes, the recovery environment can affect disks other than the one containing Windows. The checked “Format and repartition disks” option is the biggest warning sign: it may apply to every disk selected for the restore, not just the source system volume. The “Exclude disks” list is there specifically to prevent secondary drives from being touched. If the SSD was repartitioned and then formatted, the original filesystem metadata and directory structure may have been overwritten, which would explain why a scanner finds almost nothing useful. Finish the full clone first, then work only from that copy. A professional recovery service may be the best remaining option, although the results could be limited if the SSD’s controller has already processed TRIM.
The symptoms are consistent with a destructive restore rather than a simple missing drive letter. If Windows still shows the full-capacity NTFS volume but the recovery software sees only a tiny amount of recognizable data, the partition may have been recreated and the filesystem initialized. The recovery wizard likely identified the secondary disk as available for repartitioning because it was connected and not excluded. Do not run CHKDSK, initialize the disk, reinstall Windows, or save recovered files back to it. Keep the original offline after imaging and scan the image or clone instead.
That is the part I am trying to understand. I have restored images with the other SSD connected before and nothing happened to it, so I assumed the recovery would only target the system disk.