3TB Hard disc became "unallocated", how to recover?

Hello and thanks. The three partitions found all span only a small part of the disk. Here are the three screens:

OK, Partition Recovery Wizard is not going to work here and rewrite the correct partition table.

You may try to recover data either using PhotoRec or TestDisk.

If you are going to use Testdisk, exercise caution not to give any write command. You will use it only to copy the found files to another external drive of sufficient capacity which should be plugged in before you run TestDisk.

PhotoRec is much safer in that you can't give any write command at all :).

( It still beats me why the Boot partition and another small partition shows up at the end.I have always been advocating for quite sometime, given that we don't yet know how well the conventional partitioning/formatting software can deal with GPT drives, anyone having a GPT drive should save the first few sectors where the Protective MBR, the GPT header and the GPT Table resides. Then when any mishap like this occurs merely by restoring the saved sectors one could easily resurrect the drive without going through the timeconsuming data recovery procedures like this..)

I reread your first post again since I had lost track of it in two days.:)

If your intention is to keep the folder structure in-tact as is evident from it, then I have to alter my previous recommendation. In such a case you should go in for TestDisk. But exercise caution. If Test Disk finds the partition, just view the folders/files and copy them. ( Do not perform any write operation with Test Disk, until you have recovered all and find all the copied files are OK.)

And to answer your question, whether it would be possible now to resurrect the HDD without performing a data recovery operation:

If only you hadn't tried Easus Data Recovery, it could have been possible but after that it is a question mark - for we do not know how it had manipulated the drive during the data recovery process.

You can still try just by replacing the first sector which you had initialised as an MBR disk with the Protective MBR of a GPT drive which is the same for all GPT drives.

Worth trying pguru.

The pro version works fine unregistered. Try the partition recovery on that ( NOT the data recovery, they are different things.)

Recover partitions using PartitionGuru - Eassos


Recover deleted files, Partition manager and Windows backup - PartitionGuru

Thanks a lot for your replies. At the moment I am running PartitionGuru to see what this program finds. Attached is the screen shot of the disks as they are seen by it.

I had tried with testdisk before, but ran it in "user-mode", instead of starting it with admin rights. Therefore it only showed one disk at all, one that is not involved into the disaster here at all.

Now I started the scan with PartitionGuru, which takes some hours too, and afterwards had the idea to start testdisk with admin rights. Now it sees the lost harddisk. Now I did not want to break PartitionGuru, but as soon as I have the results of that I will post it here to you again to hear what you say to this.

Attached is the screen shot of partition image how it sees the disk.

Thank you very much again for your help, I really appreciate it. Thanks!

I have been trying with testdisk and photorec now, testdisk does not find more partition than the orther programs, and photorec will restore all files into a single directory too. This is what I am doing at the moment. On the other hand I am seriously considering buying MiniTool Power Data Recovery, because this program obviously would restore at least a big bunch of files to the former directory structure.

Though it is expensive... Still thinking about it...

As told in my post #14, In testdisk your intention should only be to copy the files shown in the partition of your interest and not rewrite the partition table.

So did it show the partition of your interest?

Were you able to see the files in it?

Hello and thanks for your reply.

Testdisk did not see any partitions that might have been the one to restore. There were some with 3MB size, some with 300 MB or so.

At the moment I am restoring the files an the structure with Minitool PowerData Recovery, which does it´s job very well. It promises to restore 2TB to it´s original folder structure, that might be the complete content of the disk.

But nevertheless: Since until now nothing has been written to the disk at all I would like to try to restore the complete disk after having restored whatever files I could. I would like to try your "replacing the first sector"-advice for that. If you don't mind I would like to get some more help when trying.

Thanks a lot! Martin.