Lost a partition(s) on 4TB Drive. Partition recovery software?

The partition(s) from my media storage drive have gone.

There was a 3275.90GB GPT NTFS partition with data on it, mostly backups, music and iTunes.
Maybe there was a 300MB 'Recovery' NTFS and a 195MB System Reserved' NTFS partition but I can't see from my screenshot of disk management which partitions are from which physical drive as I managed to obscure much of the LHS column with the 'Action' pull down menu.

There is nothing writing to it but I'm leaving it unplugged before I try to recover it.

I assessed it on a bare bones OS installation though:
In disk management it reads as disk 4, Unknown [disk type eg Basic], 3726.02MGB, Not initialised
Disk Management asks if I want to initialise it and gave choices of MBR or GPT. I did neither.

I had a scan with Easeus but it said I would need to buy a licence. Fair enough but I don't know if it will work, if there's better software for partition recovery or if I need to send it away for recovery.

Is there an idiot proof application to recover the partition and maintain directory structure, filenames etc?

I don't have a big hard drive spare to recover the partition to and I'm concerned recovery apps write to the disk but if I need one I'll get one within a few days, maybe an 8TB or 10TB as that 4TB filled up much quicker than I thought it would but I bought it mostly on the Backblaze MTTF data.

If you re going to attempt recovery yourself, the first thing to do is get another drive the same size or bigger than the one that is faulty. You the make a bitwise clone of the drive. (if you are familiar with Linux, use the dd command. This makes a bit by bit copy of the drive. You then perform your recovery attempts on that cloned drive. That way, if you make a mistake, you still have your original, so you can clone it again and the process over again.

How easy recovering the data will be depends on how the partition was damaged. If it is just the partition table that was damages, recovery is relatively simple and 'just' requires recreating the partition table. If the File table has been damaged, it may be possible to recreate it from the copy that NTFS file systems create (I'm assuming the file system is NTFS).

MTTF data - like all statistics - apply to populations and tells you little about an individual disk. As you are realising, backing up your data is essential if it is important - but take some comfort that you aren't the first - and won't be the last - nperson to learn that lesson the hard way.

This site https://techtalk.gfi.com/the-top-23-...ecovery-tools/ lists a number of free or try-before-you-buy applications. I haven't used any myself apart from Winhex - which works but requires quite a bit of understanding. Many people say that Recva is quite good.

Resolved.

I downloaded Minitool Partition Wizard Free 9.0.
It did the actual recovery for nothing (after my initial error).

First run it was seeing the disk as MBR and 'recovered' to three partitions.
I thought I'd bj0rked my partition forever but I deleted the 'recovered' partition, converted the physical disk to GPT, ran the wizard again and it brought my partition back.

I'm still going to have to buy a bigger disk though.

Glad you got it fixed relatively easily - just need to sort out your backup regime now as next time you might not be so lucky! :p

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Originally Posted by peterb

Glad you got it fixed relatively easily - just need to sort out your backup regime now as next time you might not be so lucky! :p

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You wot?

This is a backup box.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Frank E

You wot?

This is a backup box.

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Ah right - sorry, didn't pick that up from the OP, which said it contained backups and other stuff, rather than described as a dedicated back up drive.