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Partitions Disappear from Ext USB Disk

Last response: in Storage
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I have a 1 TB External Hard Disk. I had made 8 partitions, the 1st being of 4 GB, and the rest 7 varying b/w 100 and 150 GBs. The first one was active, and I used it to install Windows Vista.

Yesterday, I formatted by 1st partition to replace the Windows Vista setup by Windows 7 setup. And all of a sudden, my partition nos 3 to 8 disappeared.

Now my hard disk is showing just partition 1 and 2. :(  :(  :(  :(  :( 

What to do??

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Storage Expert

Did you Format that 1st Partition, or did you re-Partition the drive? A Format operation should NOT change any of the Partition Table data, but obviously a Partition will.

Anyway, it looks like you need to try a Partition Recovery tool. Partition Magic, maybe, or Getdataback NTFS, but both are good commercial products you must pay for. The Getdataback NTFS website lets you do a free trial run to verify that it CAN do what you need before paying. There are also some freeware tools that claim to do this - I just do not know any of them well enough to say yea or nay. But I suggest that's the kind of tool to look for.

I formatted only the first partition.

I tried using the Acronis Disk Director Suite. But it is showing only 3 partitions in 'good' state, and the rest in 'poor' state. So, I am hesitant in trying to recover using it.

Any leads?
Storage Expert

Try the "free trial" option of Getdataback NTFS - but ONLY if all your original Partitions were formatted to NTFS file systems. On their website, you can download and run the software. It will read all your drive structure into RAM and analyze it, then show you exactly what the drive will look like IF it goes ahead and fixes it for you. But it does NOT do anything to the drive unless you tell it to proceed and pay them their price on-line. If you pay, it fixes right away. If you don't pay, it does nothing more, but now you know just how much recovery can be done, and whether there is stuff that this particular package cannot fix.
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Storage Expert

Yes, it should be compatible. to be sure, check the website. As far as I know the way Win 7 uses the disk is fundamentally the same as previous versions.

Better than Acronis? I really don't know. I just know it has worked well for a lot of people. And it seems that its method of showing you exactly what it can do, and what might not work, before doing anything is really useful.
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