Did I just lose all of my data by accidentally deleting a partition?

[Stephen Riley]

I was using the disc management tool to delete a partition I no longer want on my external hard drive. After deleting it, it was still showing 2 separate partitions, but both showing the same name as the primary partition (which has all my stuff on it). I delete the smaller one again. Now the disc shows up as 0 partitions, just pure unallocated space. Windows does not recognize the external drive when I turn it off and on. 

 

Can I just create a partition in the unallocated space and my data will remain intact? Or is it already gone and I messed up?

[Max Veteran]

Don't make any more changes to the drive at all. Doing so will make it worse.

 

Use GetDataBack to recover the files onto a separate drive.

[Stephen Riley]

[Dot Matrix]

Might be able to use an application (like Recuva) to scan the disk, and recover the files. The files should be fine as long as you didn't format the disk.

[Joshie]

On mechanical drives, I know that data is generally recoverable as long as nothing new has been written over it. So unless you create a new partition in its place and starting putting stuff on it, everything should still be recoverable somehow, with some tool, somewhere. Even formatting is fairly 'safe', unless you used a formatting tool that writes over the partition in the process. These days, I think most formats default to a 'quick format' mode, where the drive will just behave as if the space is now empty, even though nothing has actually been physically written to it.

 

Now, if you have a solid state drive, this might be a totally different story. I honestly don't think I've seen any articles about SSD data recovery scenarios. Since bits are written to SSDs "randomly", gone might actually be gone.

[Shiranui]

Burn this to CD

https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

Boot "Parted Magic" from it and run the included "TestDisk" utility.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

Depending on how important the data is, making a full bit-by-bit image of the hard drive on a separate drive may be useful.

[Gone]

I just (today) successfully recovered most of my files using TestDisk through a Linux live CD (Ubuntu) on a NTFS hard drive. I copied the files to another external hard drive formatted in FAT32.

 

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 

Works under Windows too. I hope this doesn't break Neowin TOS but the program helped, it was a little challenging though. I couldn't recover the partitions, but after a Deep Search I pressed "P" to list all the files, C (capital C) to select all, and then transferred everything to my external drive.

 

[James035]

Don't suggest do partition now, recommended that data recovery and backup first, and then partition. Might be able to use EaseUS Partition Master

recover deleted or lost partiton.And it also can Resize/move partitions.

[timster]

get a bootable image and burn it. then boot from it and recover whatever files you need and start fresh

[LaP]

It's definitely recoverable as long as you don't write on the disk before recovering the data. I deleted the parition of my external HD once by accident and was able to recover all the data (songs, docs, ...). I think i used Recuva not sure tough.

[Raa]

I would definitely try a partition recovery tool first, often they'll scan the affected area and re-create the missing partition index you deleted with no loss of data.

 

Worst case is it won't find it and you need to run a file recovery on it, which should have no problems as the NTFS index/FAT tables should still be present!

[Xahid]

I would definitely try a partition recovery tool first, often they'll scan the affected area and re-create the missing partition index you deleted with no loss of data.

 

Worst case is it won't find it and you need to run a file recovery on it, which should have no problems as the NTFS index/FAT tables should still be present!

+1, if you want to save your time (recovery software's take too much time to scan), it's better idea to recover the partition instead.

[Stephen Riley]

Ah, that partition recovery tool would have been nice.

 

13 hours later and I have most of my data transferring back onto another external. Thanks for all the comments and help.