Stepwise Tutorial: How to Restore A Partitioned Hard Drive

Can a partition be recovered?

“I lost a hard disk partition for unknown reasons. Is it possible to recover a partition? If so, how?”

-Question from Microsoft Community

Common causes of partition loss

The following are some of the most common causes of deleted partitions:

• ❌Accidental Deletion

Among the most common partition deletion causes is unintentionally deleting or formatting the wrong partition. As a rule of thumb, always double-check before confirming the deletion of any file.

• 💾Partition Table Damage

The partition table is critical in describing partitions to the operating system. As a result, a corrupted partition table would result in partition loss.

• ✂️Improper Partition Resizing

So you're aware that you can change the size of newly created partitions. However, this process is extremely dangerous, and unforeseen events such as sudden interruptions can put the partition in jeopardy. It's best not to do this if you've never done it before.

• 🔌Unexpected System Shutdowns

Unexpected shutdowns cause computer to malfunction and damage to hard drive partitions. Power outages, infected applications, and erratic BIOS upgrades are some of the causes of system shutdowns.

• 😷Virus attacks

Malware and viruses frequently infect computers despite the presence of antivirus software. As a result, there’s a good chance that the hard drive will become infected, resulting in partition deletion.

How to restore a partitioned hard drive [2 cases]

There are 2 cases that you may encounter. You may need to recover lost data from a partitioned hard drive, or you may need to recover a deleted partition on a hard drive. We give solutions respectively on how to restore a partitioned hard drive.  

Case 1. How to recover data from a partitioned hard drive via MyRecover 

The highly recommended software for recovering data from a partitioned hard drive is MyRecover. If you didn’t lose the partition, just deleted or lost the files and folders located in the partitioned hard drive, then you can learn how to recover lost files from a partitioned hard drive step by step through the following content.

Outstanding features of MyRecover

Help with data recovery in a range of circumstances, disk formatting, virus attacks, unintentional deletions, system crashes, etc.

Support all disk-based storage media types. SD card, SSD, HDD, external hard drive, USB flash drive, etc.

Any file type in its original format can be recovered. Texts, emails, compressed files, images, videos, audio, and so on.

Highly-compatible. Windows 11/10/8/7 supports NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, and ReFS file systems. It is compatible with both 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems.

High-speed. Thanks to its powerful data recovery algorithm and sophisticated scan engine, it can quickly locate and restore deleted or lost data.

Before starting, download, install and launch MyRecover on your computer.

Step 1. Hover the mouse over the drive saved deleted files before, and click Scan.

Step 2. The tool will automatically search your hard drive to find deleted emails. You can type some keywords of the deleted files in the search box to quickly find them.

Step 3. Choose the files you want to recover > Select a place to save them. (You can recover any files during the scanning process)

Case 2. How to restore deleted/lost partitioned hard drive

The following 2 ways help you to recover deleted partition on Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7. Check them out.

Way 1. Recover the deleted partition via partition recovery software

To make things simpler, your best option is to choose a reputable partition recovery program. AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard was specifically developed to restore lost or deleted partitions. 

Step 1. Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. To recover deleted Windows partition, you could download the demo version below.

Step 2. Select Partition Recovery Wizard on the left panel in the main interface and select the disk including the lost partition. Click Next.

Step 3. Select a search mode. There are two kinds of search modes. It is recommended to choose Fast Search the first time. And then click Next.

Step 4. The tool will show the list of all lost or deleted partitions. You could select the partition you want to restore.

Step 5. After the partition recovery process completes, click Finish to exit when a message Congratulations shows. Then you can go to File Explorer to check the lost or deleted partitions.

Way 2. Retrieve lost partition using CMD

You can also use CMD to recover a lost partition. But be careful with those commands.

Step 1. Open Disk Management and find the lost partition. Remember the partition size.

Step 2. Start Command Prompt by inputting cmd in the Windows search box > choose Run as administrator.

Step 3. Type the following command and press Enter after each input.

• diskpart
• list disk. All disks in the computer will be on the list.
• select disk # (Replace # with the number of the hard disk that contains the lost partition).
• list volume. All volumes on the disk will be displayed.
• select volume # (replace # with the number of the lost partition).
• assign letter=# (Replace # with an available drive letter, from C to Z).

Closing words

Two examples of how to restore a partitioned hard drive are given in this article. It is advised that you use MyRecover if you need to recover lost data from a hard drive that has been partitioned. Use CMD or AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard to recover a deleted partition from a hard drive.