Data lost on my backup drive -Minitool disk recovery

ignatzatsonic said:

Given that......I'd deliberately avoid "data recovery" for the time being.

Concentrate on "partition recovery".

If the partition is recoverable, the data should be there and intact.

Member Jumanji is the local guru on that stuff.

Maybe he will see this thread.

@jumanji will definitely see this although I have no idea of his availability.

meebers said:

Lost ~ 1 TB of data on a 2TB drive. Tried mini tool partition wizard, 12.3 (free) and it "seems" to scan the disk. Disk Recovery runs for several hours and then crashes. It does show ~ 7-8k files it found. Information on their site says that only Pro has that capability, yet Free seems to do something?

Question is: Anybody tried Mini Tool Partition Wizard Pro and had success? Don't want to do a $130 experiment and find out it does not work. Tx for any info

Hi @meebers,

Just switched on my PC this morning and I know you will perhaps be sleeping. That gives me sometime and I have some bank work also which may take quite sometime.

Anyway to start with:

1. There is no need to be in a hurry and do not try any data recovery blindly.
2. Only if a partition is lost we shall try Partition recovery. So we must first ascertain if indeed partitions are lost.
3. Partition Wizard 12.3 Free will not recover partitions unless you pay for it. But it can scan and find the lost partitions.Upto that it is free
4. Your "data lost drive": Is it an internal or external drive?
5. Post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management as per the guidelines here. How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management

6. Run PW12.3 and post a screenshot of how the drives look in it. ( the very first screen when you launch it.)

7. Run Partition Recovery Wizard, run a quick scan,When quick scan finishes you will get a popup Window showing all the found partitions - existing as well as lost/deleted. Take a screenshot and post. Cancel and close PW. We will just be ascertaining whether indeed partitions are lost (As I said even if it finds lost partitions, it will not recover it)

8. After I examine the screenshots , we shall make an appropriate decision on how to proceed further.

Good morning jumanji and thanks for the quick response.

jumanji said:

Hi @meebers,

Just switched on my PC this morning and I know you will perhaps be sleeping. That gives me sometime and I have some bank work also which may take quite sometime.

Anyway to start with:

1. There is no need to be in a hurry and do not try any data recovery blindly.
2. Only if a partition is lost we shall try Partition recovery. So we must first ascertain if indeed partitions are lost.
3. Partition Wizard 12.3 Free will not recover partitions unless you pay for it. But it can scan and find the lost partitions.Upto that it is free
4. Your "data lost drive": Is it an internal or external drive?
5. Post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management as per the guidelines here. How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management

6. Run PW12.3 and post a screenshot of how the drives look in it. ( the very first screen when you launch it.)

7. Run Partition Recovery Wizard, run a quick scan,When quick scan finishes you will get a popup Window showing all the found partitions - existing as well as lost/deleted. Take a screenshot and post. Cancel and close PW. We will just be ascertaining whether indeed partitions are lost (As I said even if it finds lost partitions, it will not recover it)

8. After I examine the screenshots , we shall make an appropriate decision on how to proceed further.

jumanji! Really appreciate your time in helping me with this. G: is an internal drive WD20EZRZ

Both Windows Disk Management and Partition Wizard show the correct file system

WDM shows free space 1862,81 GB 100% ( actually used 0.21GB)
PW shows Used space 158.7 MB Again almost 100% free space. Partition recovery Wizard shows Partition is existing. So the immediate conclusion is there is no data seen. That is strange. Is the MFT corrupted?

Run Partition recovery Wizard again. You have put a tick mark in the square. Now double click on the selected partition.



A pop window will show the folders present. Post a screenshot just for record. (probably it will show only the System Volume Information folder.) Close that Window >Cancel and close PW. Nothing more to do with PW.

I shall have dinner and return. . By that time if you can post the screenshot we shall continue further.

OK. Fine. As expected it shows only System Volume Information and $Recycle Bin and no data.

And you have only one partition with no data in it. If indeed you had two partitions, it looks like those two partitions were deleted, a single partition created and formatted. If it was a quick format you can still try to recover the data with PhotoRec. If a full format was done, all data would have been wiped.

When one initialises a drive as GPT and creates partitions, the partition tables are written into Sector 2 which can accomodate 4 partition tables.. A back up of this sector 2 is written at sector n-33 where n is the total number of sectors in the disk. GPT is a most secure partitioning system. If the partition tables in sector 2 get corrupted, it would automatically read the backup and give access to that partition. The user wouldn't even know that the partition tables in sector 2 got corrupted.

Albeit, we followed the text book and ran Partition Recovery Wizard , which returned a single existing partition starting at sector 2048 and ending at sector 3907028991 which is a full 2TB disk.

You can again follow the text book which says if quick scan does not find the partitions you think are present, run a full scan. So instead of a quick scan run a full scan and check whether it shows any lost partition. If it does not find any lost partition, then on to Data Recovery with PhotoRec
PhotoRec - CGSecurity

Guide to using PhotoRec recovery software. - Windows 7 Help Forums

Feel free to post any queries and keep us posted. I have always learnt much reading user experiences which I use further in the data recovery projects.

Note: If you are inquisitive, you can explore the disk with Bootice to check sector 2 and the number of partitions present in the disk.
Download bootice Download Bootice 1.3.4.0

How to use bootice Lost partitions! Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

Screenshot of sector 2 of my 500GB GPT Trial disk with 2 partitions:



The next 31 sectors are also reserved for Partition tables. So in-all a GPT drive can have 32 sectors x 4 partition tables per sector = 128 partitions.

Some over in sevenforums and in here have a URL giving the free version that will recover partition[s] and/or file[s]. I think the file name you want is: MiniToolPowerDataRecovery650[LastFree] -- it is the last free version with the power to get the job done without paying anything.

rjsNote: I was wrong mentioning 6.5, the best one to use is 9.1 :)