The “map” for how you have organised your drive is made up of a few hundred bytes at the beginning of the drive. If you damage this “map”, then the operating system will report that the disk is empty, not because something physically removed itself off the disk, but because the map is missing. The “territory” (the data) is all still present.
If you lose the “map,” then a disk full of data appears to be empty. This is precisely what has most often occurred.
At the beginning of every hard disk there is a small list telling where each section (“partition”) starts and stops. Older drives contain the Master Boot Record (MBR), which takes up 512 bytes. Modern drives use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) and include a duplicate table near the other end of the disk. In either case, these are extremely small maps. All information that an operating system uses to determine how you have configured your storage devices originates from this mapping.
If you damage just a few kilobytes of this area, a completely whole and functioning drive will appear to be entirely unallocated or unformatted. Each file remains on the disk at the exact same location as prior to damaging the map. Nothing can locate any of these files due to the fact that the map is gone.
A raw or blank hard disk is often one of the simplest to restore, simply because nothing but the index was lost in the process. The index can be restored with information from the volumes it described.
Restoration does not involve writing a probable partition table and praying for success. All file systems leave recognisable structures at the beginning of their respective volumes: NTFS boot sectors and MFT records, ext4 superblocks, APFS containers and exFAT boot regions. Scanning all areas of the disk for these identifiers allows you to determine where each actual partition begins.
Those results are compared. The claims made by the boot sector regarding the volume size should correspond with both the actual size of the file system immediately following it, and an additional backup superblock located farther into the disk. If they all match, then the original organisation has been identified rather than estimated.
GPT disks make this even simpler as well since GPT maintains a complete duplicate of the entire table at the end of the disk. Surprisingly many of them can have their original organisation restored using nothing but the backup.
Do not let Windows initialise the disk. Once a disk appears as “unallocated”, Disk Management will offer to initialise the disk. Initialisation overwrites the existing corrupted partition table with a fresh, empty one and wipes the traces of the previous organisation needed for determining the original layout.
Logical-class recovery for partitions starts from £300 +VAT. Recovery cost will be fixed in writing once the free diagnostic has taken place. If the disk itself is also physically failing, this is classified as a mechanical problem and quoted accordingly; you'll know either way at the diagnostic.
You only pay if we recover your data, on all of our logical-based recovery work.
Classic partition table corruption. The data should be there in its entirety, but unreferenced. Do not initialise the disk when Windows offers, as that will overwrite the structures necessary to discover the original layout.
No. Initialising will create an empty partition table on the disk. This can be considered the single most destructive action possible at this moment. And it is presented as the “helpful” default.
Common. Interrupted resizing operations result in the partition table having volume boundary descriptions which no longer correspond with the actual file systems. Rebuildable, typically by examining the partitions/volumes themselves.
This tool is very capable, and it will write to your hard drive. If the data is important to you, and if you are not sure about what you are doing, then that write is your biggest concern. If you choose to attempt recovery, make sure you are using a read-only image of your data rather than working directly on the original disk.
Totally different problems. Do not confuse them with one another. This usually indicates that the RAID is failing to assemble. Remove all disks from the array and ship all members.
2-5 working days. Scanning a large drive for file system signatures is what slows us down, and this scales with the size of the drive as opposed to how badly the table was damaged.
The diagnostic is free, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Lost partition recovery from any drive, stick or card (hard drive, USB, SD card), with every file recovered intact. Start recovering now.