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How to recover lost partition..

B

blipblop

Senior member
Well, I guess I hosed something up. I upgraded my main drive to an SSD and decided to redo my partition.

Long story short My 1 TB partition is gone and it's sitting there as an empty volume. I haven't written anything to it and it probably has been low level formatted. I tried to run test_disk, but it didn't see it as recoverable, i'm trying to use easeUS right now...

Any other bright ideas?
 
low level format might be the wrong word, it didn't do that. I've been running a couple EaseUS right now and it's found files... going to let it churn for a bit and recover the really important stuff.
 
blipblop said:
Well, I guess I hosed something up. I upgraded my main drive to an SSD and decided to redo my partition.

Long story short My 1 TB partition is gone and it's sitting there as an empty volume. I haven't written anything to it and it probably has been low level formatted.
Click to expand...
Not unless you performed a firmware flash that was destructive. But, a full format could zero-fill it.

I tried to run test_disk, but it didn't see it as recoverable, i'm trying to use easeUS right now...

Any other bright ideas?
Click to expand...
If testdisk didn't find anything at all, it's probably gone, at least as far as being able to fully recover the FS. If EaseUS is finding files, though, that's not the case. If it can recover files with their names, I would guess a new partition table was written, and a quick format performed, or just new (a) partition(s) (in that case, testdisk can usually find something with the in-depth "Vista" search, IME, though). If it is finding names, rather than just data fragments, chances are good it can recover most of what's on there. Since it's running and finding something, now, give it however much time it wants to take to complete.

When you say you decided to redo your partition, what exactly do you mean? If you change your main drive to an SSD, you would not need to do anything to the HDD, for it to work as a data drive.

Lesson: do backups, from now on. An external drive is very cheap, in comparison to data going *poof*.
 
When you say you decided to redo your partition, what exactly do you mean? If you change your main drive to an SSD, you would not need to do anything to the HDD, for it to work as a data drive.

Responding to the above...

My old HDD was a 1 TB drive with 200 GB for OS and 800 GB for storage. After I had installed my new SSD and confirmed it was working, I wanted to merge the two partition on my HDD. I used the windows drive management to put it together and it made it a dynamic drive.

I rebooted and I could not access anything. After this happened, I was trying to do research and tried to recover using Disk Director, everything else. These programs could not read the dynamic drive. At this point, I tried to make this back to NTFS... did a button click and back to NTFS but all the data gone, but running the recovery software, it still has 3 hours to go... it's found over 2 million files already. I'm going to let it churn and see what I can recover.

Yes.. major lesson learned.. buy external drives and back up...
 
blipblop said:
My old HDD was a 1 TB drive with 200 GB for OS and 800 GB for storage. After I had installed my new SSD and confirmed it was working, I wanted to merge the two partition on my HDD. I used the windows drive management to put it together and it made it a dynamic drive.
Click to expand...
Ah! That wiped the partitions that were there, and probably overwrote a fair portion of the first however-many sectors of the disk. You can't really merge partitions, like that. There are commercial tools that can do it (I think EaseUS can, in fact), but what they are doing behind the scenes is one of several variations of making copies of data from the original partition set, making a new partition or expanding the one one, and then merging the pointers and file metadata from the partitions behind "removed." It's no simple task, and not something Windows directly supports.

If EaseUS was able to find a usable copy of the superblock, you might just be able to get complete usable files, possibly even with names and parents directories, once it is done.
 
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Yes, cannot simply "merge" two partitions that each contain data (a valid filesystem). At the very least, to do that with Windows' built-in tools, requires backing up one of the partitions to external storage, deleting that partition, and expanding / moving the other partition into that space, and then copying back over the files from the backed-up and now-deleted partition.

Or better yet, simply back up BOTH partitions, then delete and remake the partitions as needed on the original disk, and then copy back the files from both backed-up partitions, into the appropriate places on the newly-partitioned original disk.

And to do this really properly, you would make TWO external backup copies, such that you at all times have TWO copies of all of your files. No need to tempt fate, and lose your files should your external copy (but NOT "backup", once you delete the partitions on the original drive) fail.
 
blipblop said:
Well, I guess I hosed something up. I upgraded my main drive to an SSD and decided to redo my partition.

Long story short My 1 TB partition is gone and it's sitting there as an empty volume. I haven't written anything to it and it probably has been low level formatted. I tried to run test_disk, but it didn't see it as recoverable, i'm trying to use easeUS right now...

Any other bright ideas?
Click to expand...

Better to use R-studio. It is most advanced software tool for home users.
Use option like you have formatted drive. Same thing.
Here the small tutorial how to use R-studio in such cases.
http://www.angeldatarecovery.com/uncategorized/how-to-recover-data-from-formatted-drive/
 
In a panic I once formatted my drive LOL. I did successfully recover the partition, but I can't remember what software I used. All I did was Google partition recovery and found something. It could have been from Easus. I know I had to use a seprate computrer and a USB to SATA adapter to do it.

Sounds like R-Studio will fix this. Unless of course you did a low-level format.

Edit- Just checked. It was called EaseUS Partition Master.
 
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