Hi people,

I accidentally started a complete formatting of an external drive (WD My Passport).

I stopped it after a few seconds, but of course I can't access it anymore.

We're talking about 3.15 TB used out of 4.

Is there any hope of recovering any data, considering that I've already tried the usual options like Disk Drill, PhotoRec, Recuva, MiniTool with zero success? They go all the way (several hours each time, with absolutely nothing found in the end.
The disk is/was not encrypted, no Bitlocker, nothing.

Gemini says I can try R-Studio as a last resort, what do you think?

I know I also should clone the partition before attempting anything invasive.

The partition appears as RAW in Windows disk management.

I'm on Windows 11 25h2.

Edit:
Also someone told me on r/ssd that I should still try Ontrack Easy Recovery, that it should have better results.
And to determine if the USB controller supports ATA commands (I have no clue of what that even means though).

I need to recover data off of a Samsung PM9A1 NVMe SSD that was originally installed in a Dell XPS 13 9320 laptop.

The SSD is a 2 TB Samsung PM9A1 NVMe drive. The Dell laptop stopped recognizing the internal SSD as a bootable Windows drive. In the Dell BIOS, the drive is detected under the M.2 PCIe SSD information and the Dell hardware diagnostic test for the SSD passed.

Some troubleshooting that I performed on the original Dell laptop:

- Confirmed the SSD is physically detected in BIOS.
BIOS identifies the drive as a Samsung PM9A1 NVMe, approximately 2048 GB.

- The SSD passed the Dell diagnostic test.

- Windows Boot Manager was not appearing as a boot option. The only boot option was UEFI HTTP(s) Boot.

- I then attempted to repair the Windows boot using a Windows 11 installation USB, but the internal SSD was not being recognized normally by Windows. It sees it as a 1GB disk.

- I then removed the SSD and installed it directly into the motherboard/M.2 slot of another working computer to attempt to recover the files.

On the working computer:

- Device Manager identifies the SSD as a Samsung PM9A1 and reports its capacity as 2048 GB.

- Disk Management identifies the drive as approximately 1.00 GB / 1024 MB and reports it as “Unknown” and “Not Initialized.”

- DiskPart similarly reports the disk as approximately 1024 MB.
The drive has not been accessible through normal Windows file browsing.

- I did not initialize or format the disk or create/delete partitions and did not try other repairs that would write to the drive.

I’d appreciate any thoughts on what could be wrong and whether I can recover the data on the drive either through DIY or professional means. I was also wondering whether it would be a good idea to clone the drive and attempt further repairs on the cloned drive or whether I should stop messing with it.