Accessing Unallocated Drive

Alusan

Member
Mar 5, 2010
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I recently picked up a 3TB HDD to replace an older drive I still had in my system, and while installing it, I accidentally didn't push the SATA cable in all the way. So of course disk management in Windows couldn't recognize the drive, but I thought it might have been an issue with the SATA controller's firmware. So I went ahead and updated that, but after I booted into Windows and opened up disk management, I was prompted to choose MBR or GPT partitioning for a new drive. Thought it was the 3TB hard drive being recognized, since I couldn't scroll down while the message was there to check, so I chose GPT (drive was previously partitioned with a MBR), but it turns out it was one of my other 1TB data drives.

Now I didn't reformat the drive, but it's been unallocated since that happened and I don't understand why updating the firmware for the SATA controller randomly caused this drive to stop being recognized. Is there any way I can access the drive now without formatting it, or did I screw it over by selecting GPT? There wasn't any visible action after I chose that, so I'm not sure if anything was actually changed or if it was just selecting the method for when I would format the drive.

cliffs:
Drive was randomly unallocated, selected GPT when drive was previously MBR, did not format the drive yet. Can I still access the files?
 
Feb 25, 2011
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You repartitioned it. That nukes the directory info. You can't get your files without at least some specialized disaster recovery software. (It'd have to go sector by sector...)

Good luck, dude.
 

Alusan

Member
Mar 5, 2010
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Ah, okay, that's what I was afraid of. I'm glad it was this drive and not another because I didn't have anything important on it, but is any of that software free/trialware? I just tried Recuva earlier but that didn't help. Unless I'm supposed to format the drive first before using it.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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Screwing with the partition table doesn't affect the actual data in anyway, unless you formatted the volume or the firmware update wiped the drive all of the data is still there and should be accessible without any major hoops to be jumped through.

The sad part is that Windows won't help you because they conflated partitioning with filesystem creation. If you boot a Linux Live CD like a gparted disc you can use gparted or any of the other partitioning tools to recreate that partition safely, just make sure you don't create a filesystem too or you will need to do real data recovery.
 

Alusan

Member
Mar 5, 2010
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Thanks guys.

I did boot into Linux just to see if I could get into the drive with that alone, but I'll give Gparted a try in a bit. I'll take a look at EaseUS too if Gparted doesn't help. Thankfully I checked back in time.
 

Alusan

Member
Mar 5, 2010
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Just to update you guys, I was able to get the files off of the partition yesterday. So Gparted was easily able to bring up what was on the old partition, but it was unresponsive when it came time to copy the data to other partitions. It just kinda froze, although I didn't let it run over night or anything. I decided to try Easy Drive Data Recovery from max347's second link before trying any other Linux distros and that worked fine at bringing up the files and I was able to copy them all to my other HDD. Thanks for the help everyone!