External hdd recognised as 5 partitions.

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Moosed

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Dec 4, 2016
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Hello, I have never partitioned it, I tried giving it a letter (sorry for poor language) but then cancelled it when it was formatting it. I use it for all of my backups and it would be really good if I could use it and not be totally useless. This problem occurred when I changed my OS to windows 10. it looks normal in the device manager.
It is called disk 3 http://imgur.com/a/aCUnz

Side note: Disk 1 was a silly mistake, the 760 gb partition is MBR and It feels like I've just thrown away storage space, but this isn't nearly as important.

Thank you for your time.
 
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ArtPog

Admirable
Sep 17, 2014
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1. As to your USB external HDD (I assume it's a USB device), since it appears that drive is devoid of data why don't you simply format the drive and create just a single partition? What's stopping you?

2. As to your reference to a 760 GB partition on your 3 TB HDD...I assume you're referring to the 746.52 GB of unallocated disk-space on that disk, yes? Conceivably, you could retain the MBR partitioning scheme on that disk since the total data contents on the drive is only a measly 82 GB. On the other hand, if you're looking toward the future so that the system would recognize the full capacity of that 3 TB disk then you might consider converting the present partitioning scheme to GPT. BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU WOULD NEED A THIRD-PARTY PARTITION MANAGEMENT PROGRAM TO UNDERTAKE THE CONVERSION PROCESS WITHOUT LOSS OF DATA.

If you don't mind deleting the present 82 GB of data, or more likely copy that data to one of your other secondary HDDs (or to the USB external HDD), then you could utilize Disk Management to convert the disk from MBR to GPT. Capiche?

(You might want to do some research on Google re "MBR - GPT partitioning")
 
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

Judicious
Jul 30, 2014
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Hi there Moosed,

If you have some data stored on the drive, you will need to use some data recovery tool: https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893
Just save all the recovered all the data on another HDD, so you can avoid data being overwritten. After that, you can check the drive's health status out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

If you have no data stored on the drive, you can just delete the existing partitions, repartition and reformat, as ArtPog suggested.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD :)
 
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M

Moosed

Commendable
Dec 4, 2016
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Hi both, thank you for the replies! I think I have poorly described my problem; Disk 3 is my external 1tb HDD and that is the one I know I have never partitioned, it is fat32 storage and it does have lots of data on it. I have tried a couple of tools from D_Know_WD has kindly linked me, namely Recuva, then Wise data recovery and Disk drill.. Only Disk drill managed to see I had a 1tb hitachi and the rest couldn't recognise the type of storage for the E: (which only displays as 80 gb but I dont want to format it with files on it) and it then could only find a 00000.jpg which was 0bytes big. I think it's kicked the bucket but I very stupidly didn't check with crystal disk the last time I used it. It has worked for at least 6 years.. It has never looked like 5 separate partitions before.. It would be great if I could find all of my files on it but I'm not feeling very hopeful at the moment. Can I blame windows 10 for this? It only happened after "upgrading" from win 7.

With regards to my 3TB internal HDD I think I will find a third party partition management program and look into doing this later, thank you very much ArtPog!

Thank you for taking the time to test your patience with me. (I think I have written this as an answer rather than a reply but it's still just a text box)

[Edit] Disk drill has managed to to find a bunch of unnamed files but it has a 100mb limit and it's a total gamble as to what file I get.
 
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Well, unfortunately, if you don't really go with data recovery company, you can just try different data recovery tools.

I don't think this is Win 10 related. It is more likely that there's something wrong with the drive.
What happened when you tested the drive? Have you run some SMART testing on it after the issue occurred?

D_Know_WD :)

 
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madmatt30

madmatt30

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Jan 1, 2013
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^ I wouldn't be so certain it's not win 10s fault entirely.

The anniversary update rendered 2 of my external drives unreadable in win 10.

Plugging them intoa laptop running win 7 they instantly became readable again with no files missing.
I had to backup everything , then reformat the drives with the win 10 PC tk make them even useable again

Not an isolated incident either!

 
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M

Moosed

Commendable
Dec 4, 2016
3
0
1,510
Thank you guys so much for the help! I tested it with the other 2 available windows pcs and they both saw it the same as I originally linked. This software is amazing in completely dumping the entire thing into my working storage! Now to find some software for merging 2 partitions without losing data..
 
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