How to Recover Lost Partition in Hard Disk

Problem: partition(s) in external hard disk (using hard disk docking station) was lost due (cannot be seen), sometimes Windows will prompt for formatting the hard disk. This problem is caused by:-

  • “safely remove” was not used to remove the external hard disk;
  • hard disk corruption

Solution: there are various recovery tools available

TestDisk is the free and fast while the rest comes with limitations. In this tutorial, TestDisk will be used. The only disadvantage with TestDisk — using command line instead of GUI.

First of all, to recover the lost partition, the same hard disk docking station must be used. I have moved the external hard disk to another docking station and all the above recovery tools cannot detect the lost partition.

  1. run “testdisk_win.exe
  2. select “Create”:-
    TestDisk-01
  3. select the hard disk having lost partition:-
    TestDisk-02
  4. if hard disk is formatted using Windows, then select “Intel”:-
    TestDisk-03
  5. select “Analyse”:-
    TestDisk-04
  6. select “Quick Search”:-
  7. after “Quick Search”, it will detect lost partitions in green (in this example there are 2 partitions):-
  8. select “Write” to recover the lost partitions:-
  9. type “Y” to write partition:-
  10. select “Ok” to reboot:-
  11. select “Quit”:-
  12. select “Quit”:-
  13. After reboot the hard disk, the 2 lost partitions reappear:-
  14. for more information refer to http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step#Quick_Search_for_partitions