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My hard drive suddenly appeared entirely unallocated in partition manager. I tried asigning a drive letter to it and seeing if it would recognise the old file system, but it did not. Instead it asked to format it. I believe it originally was NTFS, is there any way I can get Windows to recognise the files on my drive again?

Blazing Blast
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    There are multiple partition-recovery programs out there that may be effective. I have no experience using any of them but some have free trials such as https://www.easeus.com/ppc/partition-recovery-bing.html?msclkid=4d7cd6d11a471fd7c995b28786bd3266. I would recommend imaging the drive with something like a dd imaging tool in Linux in case something goes wrong. That way you can try something else if the first thing goes wrong. – Brian May 06 '23 at 18:33
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    Did the drive originally have one partition or multiple? Re-adding a partition would work only if it was placed starting at exactly the right position (testdisk's job is finding that)... and, importantly, if the data is actually still there. Partition tables don't just disappear, and if yours has disappeared then chunks of the filesystem may have disappeared as well. Is this an SSD or a mechanical HDD? – u1686_grawity May 06 '23 at 18:36
  • My old Linux filesystem may have been on there too, but I wouldn't really mind if I lose all of that. I know that the first partition was what I want to recover. The rest is allowed to die in the process. On a HDD – Blazing Blast May 06 '23 at 18:39
  • Just in case, did you "suddenly" put it into a USB enclosure? – Tom Yan May 06 '23 at 19:26
  • I believe that it is because I have accidentally overwritten the firsts 256 bytes with junk a week ago, that would explain some other weird behaviour too. – Blazing Blast May 07 '23 at 07:59

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The solution depends on the problem.

Unfortumately the most likely cause of the problem is a failure of the disk - which can't be solved with off-the-shelf software - you would need expert data recovery services - probably working on a hardware level to fix this. Any serious attempt to recover data without knowhow will make the chance of eventual recovery less.

If it is software, the first thing to do is clone the disk using something likeddrescue. If this works it us a software issue and you can continue below.

On the copy, run testdisk to scan the drive and try find filesystem signatures and rebuild partitions based on the location of those.

davidgo
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A first measure should be to examine the state of your disk. As the disk is detectable, you could examine its SMART status, on this computer (if this wasn't the boot disk) or on another computer (inside an enclosure). You could use a product such as Speccy that will indicate whether the found data is good or bad news.

If you decide to try and recover the disk, you could use TestDisk, which is a free product that may be able to help.

However, if you have irreplaceable data on the disk, you will need to recover it before you modify anything on it.

You may try MiniTool Data Recovery Software Free, which saved me a couple of times. It will search for files on the disk, but won't modify the disk itself.

harrymc
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