Lost Drives after upgrade

DaHole · 29 Nov 2015

I upgraded from win 7 64 bit to Windows 10 "c drive" and lost my two drives (E and F) that I use as backups to my primary drive.

My primary "c" drive is actually 2 drives that are mirrored so if one would fail I can replace it and not lose a thing. These are 1TB drives so total space is 1TB

I have two additional drives (E and F) that are 3TB in size and while I use Robocopy to keep these drives in sync, They are technically an additional 6TB of space I can use. Anything of value from C drive is Robo'd over to E for backup. Then I Robo the Entire E over to F so I have two backups on C and one backup of E.

After my upgrade E and F are gone. I will lose Data if I can't get E or F back.

You will notice that my C no longer looks to be mirrored and from File explorer I would agree it no longer is.

How do I get my E and F back. They are disk 2 and disk 3 and if I right click on them all options are Gray except help if I Right click on the 2gb space or offline, properties, help if I Right click on disk 2.

OldMike65 · 29 Nov 2015

Another user had a similar problem as yours, he ran chkdsk on the drives affected, and it fixed his problems.

DaHole · 03 Dec 2015

That did not fix anything.

Molyy · 04 Dec 2015

You can use Easeus partition master free to first recover the data on disk 2 and 3, then repartition the two disks and save the data on them again.

topgundcp · 04 Dec 2015

From the screen shot, the 2 partitions are GPT Protective partition
This type of partition protects GPT disks from previously released MBR disk tools such as Microsoft MS-DOS FDISK or Microsoft Windows NT Disk Administrator. These tools are not aware of GPT and do not know how to properly access a GPT disk. Legacy software that does not know about GPT interprets as GPT Protective partition when it accesses a GPT disk. With this type of partition, you cannot format, assign letter.

OPTION 1: use a free third party partition manager such as: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to convert these 2 disks into MBR disk type without data loss since Windows Disk Management tool does not have this feature.

OPTION 2: Connect these 2 disks to the previous versions of Windows such as XP, Vista, 7 then you'll see them again which you can backup your data to another disk then re-initialize them to be a GPT type disk since the 2 disks you have both 3TB. With GPT disk, the partition can be greater 2TB while MBR type disk is limited to 2TB.

Hope this helps !!!

DaHole · 05 Dec 2015

Thanks Topgundcp,

My concern is why they are now a GPT protected drive. Before the upgrade They were already a single 3TB partition. Because of that I think I will go the route of putting them into another windows 7 box. I would be concerned that I will have some data loss if I convert to mbr since I would expect there must be some files that would fall in the slice between the 2TB and 1TB partition.

Am I off base here?

topgundcp · 05 Dec 2015

Yes, to be safe, just connect them to a Windows 7 box then try to save data to another MBR drive and test with Windows 10. Once done, re-initialize the 3TB to GPT type disk, format and copy back your data.

DaHole · 05 Dec 2015

Here is what it looks like in a win 7 box. If I initialize it, will scrub the data on it?

DaHole · 06 Dec 2015

DaHole said:

Here is what it looks like in a win 7 box. If I initialize it, will scrub the data on it?

and a second question is what is a good boot utility that I could use to just look at the disk to see if the files are still on the drive?

DaHole · 07 Dec 2015

Anything?