I had all 11 of my disks connected and changed the drive letter on a partition in disk management. After that 2 of my disks went RAW. one is a 4TB Seagate with 2 partitons with videos on them. The other is a 1TB flash drive with videos on it. Right now I have Testdisk running on the 4TB drive and has been running for 1.5 hours and it has not even got to 1%. May take it a week. Does anyone know of a free way to recover these partitions? TIA, Bill
Sorry, but if you had read the whole post you would have seen that I have Testdisk running on the 4TB drive. It has now been over 2 hours and it is not even to 1%. Will take at least a week at that rate. Thanks, though.
If the partition table is lost, it needs to be rebuilt. This involves scanning for filesystem type, start and end sectors, location of the root directory, and location of the allocation table (NTFS MFT is not always at the same place like FAT). Should the quick scan not find anything, it needs to deep scan, which can take a long time. A little bit of scanning is always involved, unless you are very lucky. Testdisk usually has a good chance to recover at least a part of the partition. In the very old days, Norton Disk Doctor was the tool of choice.
Yeah, I'm aware of Norton and used it in the past. Testdisk is at 3% and since this is a 4TB drive I understand it will take a while, I shut it down though. I have others that can see the data but are limited in what they can recover. I purchased all of Aomei Pro software on Aug. 6th I made images with Backupper and One Key on Sept 15th. I lost my C: drive on the 16th. I had to load an image from a month ago using Hasleo because all of Aomei's boot *.ISO's kept telling me I needed an offline key which they didn't supply. Have contacted them but seem to get only No help. Right now, I found that I have EaseUS Data recovery pro installed. I had forgotten about it. So far it has found the second partition and data. It's still scanning so hopefully it will find the first partition. MiniTool Partition Wizard can see the partitions but can't recover them without upgrading to Pro. Maybe on the 1st when I get my Social Security check. Not sure why changing a partition Drive letter would cause these two drives to go RAW. Partition Find and Mount also failed, It's worked many times for me in the past. Thanks Microsoft.
My answer really was meant for the Gentleman above me who seems to think restoring a partition table is a matter of seconds. And then, they come around the corner with automatic (and unasked for) Bitlocker encryption of your drives. That's the spirit.
Sorry Carlos, I agree his post sounded like all I had to do was wave my magic wand. Aomei sent me an offline key for Backupper and I am now building new boot media. Trying to use the boot media on my Ventoy drive kept asking for an offline key. I installed all 4 of the Aomei softwares and Partition Assistant Pro asked if I wanted to preserve the license information so I clicked yes and it is activated. Probably an old 1 year key from an old installation of their Giveaways. It is running now to try and repair the two partitions on the 4TB disk. Will take some time but is much much faster then Testdisk. Been running about an hour and is up to 15%. Hope this works. I got the machine codes for One Key and Fast Recovery so maybe I can get offline keys for those also. All the keys they sent for the software just returns "The key has already been used please buy a new key". Thanks, Bill EDIT: Boot media built and copied to Ventoy. When trying to use the previous boot media it kept asking for an offline key. Anyway, Now making an image of this drive when that's done I will have to wait for Partition Assistant to finish. Could take some time. I do have an image of the full drive from the day before I lost my hard drive. Should have everything back to normal if I can restore it. With the exceptions of the two Raw drives. Meaning all of Aomeis software should be registered. Making personal backups now also since it's been 5 days since putting this image on the drive.
Geeze, Carlos, I guess I'm getting senile. I turned 85yo on July 28th and my memory is getting really bad. I found that I had DMDE installed with a license key and activated. Ran it on the 1TB RAW flash drive and it found 2300+ files in less than an hour, and I am now in the process of recovering those files to another empty 4TB Seagate drive (this one is NTFS). The flash drive was exFat and I have always had trouble with exFat drives. I have no idea why I didn't reformat it to NTFS before putting anything on it. Actually, I just realized the 4TB drive is also exFat. I think I'm losing my MIND. (go figure)
A few years ago, i admit. My drives was then the traditional spinning disk, sata to usb3 and ssd to sata (II)
Yeah, not all tools work equally good or bad in different situations. But, if you love your data, don't use any FAT-based filesystems. They offer almost no protection against data loss. NTFS has journaling and can rollback or complete incomplete transactions. It's much more resilient.
Granted, I have now recovered the flash drive and reformatted to NTFS. This drive is only a coupla months old. The 4TB is one I've had for about three years and never used. I had a 4TB WD drive that was failing and just cloned it to the Seagate before it died. Dumba$$ Bill didn't even think about the file system and cloned to an exFat drive. (getting old) Anyway, browsing another drive I found Acronis Disk Director 12.5. (Last version ever made) Got it here on MDL in one of @whizkidraj's raffles. I had it installed on my Win 7 and never thought to use it on this Win 10. I had the registration key from Win 7 registry, and merged it, installed the software. It's been running over 4 hours now and has found 33 deleted partitions. Don't know when this thing will stop. Present results: