Member Avatar for exchequer598

Hey guys, help me out! It's a long read, but please have patience, I really need you!

I am running Windows 7 on a 500 GB SATA HDD. I have 4 partitions, and had wanted to expand the size of my 4th partition. So I burnt a GParted disk (0.6.2) and then booted into it, resized the partition (moved 30 GB off from D:, added it to E:, then moved it to F:, which is the partition I wanted to expand) and when I started the process, in a few minutes, it threw some Read/Write error and quit. So when I restarted my machine, Scandisk ran and reported no errors. But when I logged in, all 3 partitions (except my primary, C: ) were gone! I fired up Disk Management tool to see that 2 partitions were unallocated and the other was empty. I panicked and downloaded this free tool, MiniTool Partition Recovery tool and ran a scan. It reported that it could recover the contents of my E: (and also showed all the files I had) and so I clicked on 'Recover'. Then it showed up an message box, saying "At least one partition will be deleted, do you want to proceed?". Fearing it would delete my data, I clicked on Cancel. Now again I went back to Windows Disk Management to find that all 3 partitions had been marked unallocated!!

Now I'm guessing the partition table has become corrupted, not the data, as all processes stopped quickly (GParted stopped in a few minutes, and MiniTool too). What could have gone wrong?

And please suggest some trusted partition recovery tool. I am currently at a loss of over 300GB worth of very very precious data - my entire music collection that I've amassed over 12 years - it is all that is me. Thanks.

Edited by exchequer598 because: n/a
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As described, an interrupted resize/move often leaves the on-disk partitions inconsistent even though most file data remains unchanged. Stop any further writes to that disk now — do not create partitions, do not run Windows "repair" or format, and do not let recovery tools write to the original drive. That is the single-most important step.

Make a full, sector-by-sector image of the whole disk to a different physical drive and work from the image. On a Linux live CD a reliable way is GNU ddrescue; an example command (adjust paths/devices for your system) is:

sudo ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sda /mnt/backup/sda.img /mnt/backup/sda.log

The image and its log let you retry safely; keep the original drive read-only.

Use a non-destructive scanner against the image to look for lost partition entries and to list files before writing anything back. Run a tool that can "Analyse" the image, perform a quick and then deeper search, and allow you to browse and copy files to another safe drive. Do not accept any prompts to automatically write a new partition table until you have confirmed you can read and copy your files from the found partitions.

If a partition-table rebuild fails, fall back to file-level recovery (file carving) from the image to extract your important data. If you are uncomfortable with imaging and read-only workflows, stop and consult a professional data-recovery service — further attempts can make recovery harder. Finally, and were correct to point toward partition-repair approaches; just make sure the workflow is: image first, then attempt recovery on the image, and always copy recovered files to a separate physical drive.

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Member Avatar for BobMaria

Hi,

As you said that you lost three of partitions except your primary C: partition then at such stage with the help of a data recovery software you can retrieve all of the three lost partitions with your data by using Kernel for partition repair software. It will help you to short out your problem and to get back all of 300GB worth of very very precious data.

You can try it from -

Member Avatar for robindell10

There Are Number of Tools For the Recovery is available on the Internet.You can Use any one from that.I am using The Partition Recovery For This.I also Face this Same Problem but the With the Help of Partition Recovery.I can recovery My all the Data.This is also very Easy to Use and also user Friendly Software.

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