Data recovery for GPT partition?

kris_hm

Distinguished
Feb 14, 2014
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3
18,695
I recently had an issue with one of my 4TB disks while recovering my PC and my entire disk was lost all of a sudden. Literally it was working and all my data was there and then I restarted my computer one time and then suddenly the disk was uninitialized. The partition style was GPT and I was using approximately half the drive for storage when the drive suddenly became uninitialized. I was using windows 8 and installed windows 7 during my repair process which seems to have caused this disk un-initialization. Inside of windows 7 I decided to reinitialize the disk and the system can see it and use it now but all my data is gone. I knew I would need to do some kind of recovery on it if I wanted to restore my data so I have not written any new data to the drive hoping to restore it. I am back on windows 8.1 now and my computer seems to be running fine. I am trying different data recovery software to see if any of them can find my data. Does anyone know what I might need to do to restore my drive?
 
Solution
Well it depends on what happened when you "decided to reinitialize the disk" if it took a long time then likely it filled your drive with zeros. If it was quick then likely it just created a new NTFS partition and most of your data is still there.

At this point I would do a NTFS scan with dmde.com if successful it will use NTFS fragments to reconstruct the filesystem. As a last resort you can try data carving with Photorec from CGSecurity.

S Haran

Distinguished
Jul 12, 2013
219
0
18,910
Well it depends on what happened when you "decided to reinitialize the disk" if it took a long time then likely it filled your drive with zeros. If it was quick then likely it just created a new NTFS partition and most of your data is still there.

At this point I would do a NTFS scan with dmde.com if successful it will use NTFS fragments to reconstruct the filesystem. As a last resort you can try data carving with Photorec from CGSecurity.
 
Solution