I just installed Windows 8 Pro, as soon as I connected my external HDD, it asked me how do I want to initialize it, by mistake, I chose GPT. now the partition is there in RAW format, if I try to convert it to MBR it fails. I have 2 TB on it, how can I save this mess
yes bro, there was 2 TB of DATA,now I don't want to format it in win 8 otherwise ill lose the data. My mistake was that I initialized it as GPT in the beginning
In Windows 8 pro desktop --. conrol panel --> all contol panel items --> computer management --> disk management --> choose drive where data is stored by right clicking "open" --> copy any data you want to transfer --> paste in partition or drive you want to move it --> when data is copied then change drive to MBR
Yep...you wiped your drive successfully clean. I always refuse such actions, as it happend years ago nearly same way. I needed to use a recovery software to retrieve my data partionally, thank god the majority wasw restored. I formatted it quick so the software can access it but no data is overwritten by format.
If the partition structure of the drive is intact then identify the drive letter of the drive and use the "fixmbr" cmd pointed at drive from cmd prompt as admin .. This may or may not work .. If you lost your data and had no backup you will never do that again, right?
Little challenge in that case is, that an additional drive with same size as the recovered one is needed, as afaik data cannot be restored on the same drive :coll2:.
Never faced that problem with Win 8 . And i get offen USB-HDDs from friends. Even my one USB powered drive never prompted me to initialize it. The last time i had this, was after plugging in my new SSD. As it came RAW, Windows asked me how to initialize, but only after i started Disk Management.
You know there is a lot of lost data coming from Win8. I copied a folder full of data into a new folder I just made a while ago and when I opened the new folder to view the old folder full of data... it was ... gone... I have since recovered all my data and more (was months ago). But.. it sure seems to be happening a lot, data loss that is. I was able to reproduce it. 500GB data in a folder -> make new folder -> drag folder with 500GB of data into new folder. POOF!.. but I cannot get it to do it anymore lol, I think something was WAY off with that install of Win8 at the time.
Windows Explorer is known for that quite a long time, it´s not a problem that appeared with Win 8. One of the reasons i´m using Total Commander, luckily the 'Total' is meant literally. One of the best investions of my life, and not expensive at all, for what you get .