Partition Recovery

Many of us need the partition recovery now and then. You may have the experience that system can not find partitions or can not access to them even you can see them. If you want to access to these files on this partition, you have to recover the lost or deleted partition or fix the boot sector of the partition first.

For better data security, our free backup software - EASEUS Todo Backup will help you a lot. It provides easy-to-use interface to backup and restore your system, disk and partition in a few minutes.

As we know, one physical disk can be divided into several partitions (the drive letters such as C:, or D:), they are also called "volumes". Once a hard disk is divided into several partitions, directories and files of different categories may be stored in different partitions. More partitions provide more control but too many may become cumbersome. Careful consideration of the number of the partition is necessary.

What are the purposes for partitioning?

We can conclude the purposes of partitioning as the following:

(1) Separation of the operating system files from user files.

(2) Having an area for operating system virtual memory swapping/paging.

(3) Keeping frequently used programs and data near each other.

(4) Having cache and log files separate from other files.

(5) Use of multi booting setups, which allow users to have more than one.

(6) Operating system on a single computer. For instance, one could install Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or others on different partitions of the same hard disk and can choose to boot into any operating system (supported by the hardware) at power-up.

(7) Protecting or isolating files, to make it easier to recover a corrupted file system or operating system installation. Other file systems won't be affected and the drive's data may still be salvageable if one of partitions is corrupted. It also can reduce the chances of the file system on this partition becoming corrupted after having a separate partition for read-only data.

(8) Raising overall computer performance on systems with smaller partition is more efficient. For instance, large hard drives with only one NTFS file system typically have a very large sequentially-accessed Master File Table (MFT) and it generally takes more time to read this MFT than the smaller MFTs of smaller partitions.

How to recover my lost partition?

When you could not see partition you need, it might be corrupted or lost and the data on it could be lost with the partition table. Actually, the partition was not really lost, even if partition table or its boot sector was destroyed by virus or deleted accidentally. If partition table was destroyed by virus or other defeat, EASEUS Partition Table Doctor can help you to do partition recovery.

Partition Table Doctor is partition recovery software for hard disk partition recovery and repair. It is designed to recover the deleted, damaged, lost or corrupted partitions on hard drive, backup and restore, repair partition table, MBR, boot sectors, etc. Partition Table Doctor runs under MS-DOS, and Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.

Partition Table Doctor can help you to do partition recovery except for physical damage.

Once you run Partition Table Doctor, it will automatically check and repair partition table or boot sector of the lost or corrupted partition to recover partitions. If boot sector of one FAT16/FAT32/NTFS partition was Corrupted, it will mark with "×" and "Fixboot" is very suitable for repairing boot sector of partition.

If you want to recover your lost and deleted partition, you have two options to do it. One is "Restore partition table" to do partition recovery if you have created backup file of partition table and boot sector of partition. Another is Rebuild Partition Table to recover partitions automatically.

You can follow these steps to recover your lost or deleted partition:

1. Rebuild Partition Table can do damaged or lost partitions recovery for you. Choose "Operations" -> Rebuild Partition Table or click "F3" key to recover your lost partitions when the program is in process.

2. Partition Table Doctor will ask you to choose one mode to do partition recovery from "Auto" or "Interactive".

The Auto mode will automatically save every partition found without process control within search processing. The Auto Mode process is the same in most situations. If no partition has been found by this mode, Partition Table Doctor would suggest you choose Interactive mode to search again. Searched partitions will be displayed on screen in time sequence within search processing.

The Interactive mode allows you to select each partition found in Partition Table Doctor manually. Under this mode, before choosing these detected partitions, the browse option would permit you to preview the folders and files in the root directory on this partition for a more intuitional adjustment on it. If it displays the same as the original one that means this function can fix it.

If you are familiar with your partition or make sure which partition table has lost or deleted, you can choose Interactive mode directly to recover it.

3. Rebuilding Partition Table uses RAM rather than writing to hard disk directly. The software will pop up a dialogue box to ask if you choose the right partition table. Click “Yes” to rebuild partition table, and “No” will back to the last step to search repeatedly until the partitions which you need have been found.

Pressing the "Ctrl+S" key or selecting "Save" from the "General" menu if you're sure that all partitions have been found, please save before exiting. And then reboot computer, you will find the lost partitions has been recovered.

In fact, partition recovery is one of the features that Partition Table Doctor can implement, if you are suffering different problems from the mentioned above about partition table, you can go here to see more…

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