External 2TB HDD contents gone after creating bootable partition

Welcome to the forum. Were you have gone wrong is drive letters can change when you add new paritions post a screen shot from disk manager so we can see

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. Were you have gone wrong is drive letters can change when you add new paritions post a screen shot from disk manager so we can see

The problem is that when you create a recovery drive using Windows tools (either the built-in tool or the Media Creation Tool) there is a warning that everything on that drive will be erased. The problem is that the warning is referring to the entire PHYSICAL drive - and not just the drive letter (partition) that is specified. The first thing either one of the recovery creation tools does is wipe the entire PHYSICAL drive specified - just like using the diskpart clean command. Then it creates a FAT32 partition at the front of the physical drive - and if the physical drive has a capacity greater than 32 GB, the rest of the drive is left unallocated.

So, @amdc, when you see the results of disk management on that external 2TB drive, you will see a 32GB FAT32 partition at the front of the drive, and the rest of the drive is unallocated. You will need to use specialized data recovery software to recover the partition that was deleted. Since you moved the data to the end of the drive, you might get lucky and be able to get it back.

EDIT: ah... I see you posted disk management, and I was, unfortunately, correct. Good luck with the partition recovery.... but you should be fine.

Alright so the pictures have now been sent currently being moderated as noted by tenforums. By the way Samuria as you can see for the nth time windows 10 is trying to reformat the whole external drive even if the letters have been adjusted as you can see I have already recovered the lost partition for the nth time making sure it doesn't get referenced as D: this time, to be precise it was allocated an E: by easeUS upon recovering, I did try creating a recovery drive again and as you can see on easeUS the D: partition was the 32GB (got resized automatically by windows during first try leaving me an unallocated 3.73GB in the middle of D: and E:) but its fine, then proceeded with choosing D: as the recovery drive , prompted for data deletion, continue pressing ok and then suddenly the previous formatting notification about D: drive popped up and as I figured the E: drive is again unallocated so right now I am recovering it once again, so it does seem windows 10 doesn't want to create a recovery without wiping my whole drive?

NavyLCDR said:

The problem is that when you create a recovery drive using Windows tools (either the built-in tool or the Media Creation Tool) there is a warning that everything on that drive will be erased. The problem is that the warning is referring to the entire PHYSICAL drive - and not just the drive letter (partition) that is specified. The first thing either one of the recovery creation tools does is wipe the entire PHYSICAL drive specified - just like using the diskpart clean command. Then it creates a FAT32 partition at the front of the physical drive - and if the physical drive has a capacity greater than 32 GB, the rest of the drive is left unallocated.

So, @amdc, when you see the results of disk management on that external 2TB drive, you will see a 32GB FAT32 partition at the front of the drive, and the rest of the drive is unallocated. You will need to use specialized data recovery software to recover the partition that was deleted. Since you moved the data to the end of the drive, you might get lucky and be able to get it back.

EDIT: ah... I see you posted disk management, and I was, unfortunately, correct. Good luck with the partition recovery.... but you should be fine.

thanks for that information, now I was previously reading a guide that it was somewhat doable without touching the existing data on the drive, well I think they are wrong and you are right :) I'm just gonna get another usb for the recovery

amdc said:

thanks for that information, now I was previously reading a guide that it was somewhat doable without touching the existing data on the drive, well I think they are wrong and you are right :) I'm just gonna get another usb for the recovery

Once you have made a recovery USB flash drive, you can then transfer it to a FAT32 partition on an external hard drive and it will work as desired. My laptop and desktop computers both have SSDs as their primary drives and 1 TB HDDs as secondary drives. I have FAT32 rescue partitions on both of the HDDs, and backup images saved in the NTFS partition that follows the FAT32 partition. But you can't let Windows or the Microsoft Media Creation Tool create the FAT32 partition because it will erase the remainder of the physical drive before it creates the FAT32 partition.