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External USB HDD shown as "System Reserved" and is empty
Hello,
I am new to the forum and not sure if this is the correct place for my question, so please forgive me if not. Moreover, I apologize for the long thread but I want to explain in details what happened.
After a system crash, I tried to restore my win 7 from an acronis true image backup file stored on an external USB HDD (WD Passport, 1TB). After booting with acronis true image, I realized that I have another copy of the backup file on a second partition G: on the internal HD, so I restored this to drive C:. Since the system did not boot, I inserted Win7 CD to make a system repair, which also did not work. So I decided to install windows newly from CD. I had the message "Windows cannot be installed into this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style". Following an advice after a search in google, I used Diskpart to clean the targeted volume. I can say I am 98% sure that I selected the right volume and that the external HDD was upluged. Anyway, after this, the installation did not work, but I discovered that the two partitions on the internal HDD had gone. I thought this is not too bad, since I have a copy of all my data on the external HDD. So I installed win 8.1 on a new partition on the internal HDD and kept a second partition for data to be copied later.
Installation went fine. Then I wanted to copy my data from the external HDD. The surprise is: the drive is shown with the name "System Reserved (E:)", previously, it was called "WD Passport ....". Even worse, it is completely empty and the whole space of 1 TB is shown as free.
1. As I said, I am almost sure I did not clean the external HDD. I am even almost sure it was uplugged, but cannot say this for 100%.
2. Moreover, I did not touch the external HDD from inside acronis true image, where it was actually shown with the correct name.
3. Even if the HDD was plugged, I did not notice any operation on it that took even seconds of time.
So I hope my data on the external HDD was not deleted or overwritten. I attached it to the PC at work and it shows the contents in the attachment.
Any hope to rescue my data? Please help!
Much thanks in advance.