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Regain a lost drive using Test Disk - An Illustrated Guide
PART 1:
More often, users report that a hard drive/partition is lost/not recognised and does not show up in My Computer though it can be seen in the Device Manager and Disk Management.
This situation typically arises when Windows is reinstalled or an external drive is moved to another PC.
It is mostly a corrupt/missing partition table which is responsible for this and can easily be fixed with the freeware Test Disk.
Newbies will find this illustrated guide helpful.
1.Download the latest version of Test Disk – Windows version from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
2.Unzip the downloaded file to your C drive.
3.Open C:/testdisk-6.12 , right-click the testdisk_win.exe icon and Run as administrator. Click on Yes in the User Account Control Window. Use Keyboard’s arrow keys to navigate.
4.First Window: Select No Log, and press the ENTER key.
5.Second Window: Should show up all your drives including the lost drive. The capacities should be indicated correctly. Then you have life. Select the lost drive, Proceed, ENTER.
6.Third Window: Select partition type, Intel Intel/PC partition, ENTER.
7.Fourth Window: Select Analyze, ENTER.
8.Fifth Window: Should show all partition/s in the selected lost drive. Select Quick Search, ENTER.
9.Sixth Window: Confirm whether the partition was created by Vista/(Windows 7). Press Y if yes/not sure. N otherwise.
No screenshot here since I tried Test Disk for this guide on a Maxtor OneTouch II external drive with a valid partition table. You may get this sixth window when trying to fix a lost drive.
10.Seventh Window: Test Disk should indicate first partition of your lost drive as bootable and "Structure: OK". Press ENTER to continue.
11.Eighth Window: Select Write, ENTER.
12.Ninth window: Confirm write partition table by pressing Y .
13.Tenth Window: Asks you to reboot, Press ENTER.
14.Close Test Disk and reboot.
At some stage or other Test Disk may take a long time to scan, analyse and process all data necessary to rewrite the partition table. Be patient.
If one looks deeply into the screenshots, it will become evident that Test Disk can perform many other tasks like backing up the data in the lost drive, fixing a corrupt MBR etc.,
I understand that PhotoRec which is part of this program can recover photo and video files even from an accidentally formatted media. Keep this in mind and try should you face such a situation.
Users who actually tried this program to fix/recover may share their experience. We can learn from others’ experiences and help others.
Note: Most content of this thread already appear in another post elsewhere in this forum in response to a query. I have now put that in stand-alone thread with added screenshots so that it can be referenced and users can find it easily.
Last edited by jumanji; 09 Oct 2011 at 06:12. Reason: made this PART 1