Any Way To Recover A (New) Full External Drive From Missing GPT?

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It's not clear if you don't see the partition at all (from disk manager) or you see it as RAW

In the first case use a partitioning SW, (from easeus, paragon, acronis...) and use their function to "undelete partitions/recover partitions"

In the second case just try chkdsk x: /f as admin.

If it doesn't work hardly you can recovery anything w/o a second disk.

 

Ok then go for the first option I suggested.

 

my recommendation is UFS Explorer Professional Recovery
I think it will get the job done

 

He is (hopefully) not in need to recovery anything than few bytes about the partition structure.

Trying to recover files from a filesystem that has (hopefully) no problems is an huge waste of time in the best scenario. A way to loose some files that are perfectly fine in the worst case.

No need to use a missile to catch a sparrow.

 

Sorry if sidetracked or off topic, but I have been seeing quite a few posts about missing or broken partitions (EFI, WinRE, etc) on GPT drives lately, and also been thinking about switching to UEFI, GPT from BIOS, MBR for years, and every time I try to, I get all manner of problems. So, I thought GPT was supposed to be so "robust" and safe, yet never in my life have I had an MBR drive spontaneously "corrupt" like this, only if the hardware itself died (very rare).

I know all the "improvements" of GPT over MBR.
"You can have a bazzilion partitions without logical partitions!!!1" - Yep, I've never needed more than 3.
"It's so "robust" and has redundant/backup boot files!!!1" - Yep, yet they seem to break more anyway, have three or four partitions instead of one and therefore cannot be resized etc. because the actual data part is sandwiched in between all that redundancy junk/space-waste.

On my PCs, my graphics card and/or monitor behaves terribly with UEFI and is locked/greyed out at 800x600 during Windows install and several other things like Macrium bootable rescue media, etc. all the way up to the point I install the graphics driver, and again every time I change graphics drivers. It's very hard to even get to that point because at 600p, basic installer dialogs don't even fit on screen.

 

UEFI partitions are pointless and dangerous, the only problem they solved, isn't here anymore. Thanks to native VHDs and lookalike solutions for XP, Vista Linux.

It's just like the IP v6, and anything with a worldwide unique ID, they sell those things as [security] improvements, but the final scope is to make easier to identify the users, their actions and their locations.

Stay on MBR until the dawn of time, if you can.

 

Obviusly there are already cases when you are forced (like 99% of NVME drives and large data drives).

But for the OS you can have multiple OSes inside native mbr formatted vhds even if they are placed in a guid physical partition.

For the data drives I personally prefer to use 2TB drives pooled together with the great DrivePool, for redundancy at drive or folder level, and to have multiple drives pooled together in a single large virtual drive.

A broken 2TB drive over a 10TB pool is way less problematic than a broken 10TB drive. A broken 2TB drive over a mirrored Pool isn't a problem at all (excluding the expense for a new replacement).

Obviously this is not applicable when you already have a 2TB+ drive.

 

This issue can be tricky with external drives, first thing I do is try plugging it into another usb port, if that doesn't work I would restart the pc since Microsoft Windows can become confused or corrupted.
I even keep a VHD file handy to boot with a fresh Windows OS waiting to use just in case to see if windows itself is the problem.
Next step try on another pc to see if it works, if it doesn't then it might be corrupted or damaged or it could be the usb controller on external is broken, which happened to me before and had to take drive out of case and connect it internally to find out the drive was fine and working as expected.

 

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Windows has nothing to do with this. The MBR and /or PBR got corrupted for whatever reason.

That's all.

Connecting the drive elsewhere solves nothing.

You have to recover the partition table info, if it fails you can use linux fdisk to create one where hopefully it was located (that's easy if the disk had a single partition).

If recovering or recreating the partition table brings to nothing a traditional file recovery SW is, practically, the only remaining option.

But, like I said this involves a an empty drive, which is what's the OP hasn't handy.