My hard drive suddenly appeared entirely unallocated in partition manager. I tried asigning a drive letter to it and seeing if it would recognise the old file system, but it did not. Instead it asked to format it. I believe it originally was NTFS, is there any way I can get Windows to recognise the files on my drive again?
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The solution depends on the problem.
Unfortumately the most likely cause of the problem is a failure of the disk - which can't be solved with off-the-shelf software - you would need expert data recovery services - probably working on a hardware level to fix this. Any serious attempt to recover data without knowhow will make the chance of eventual recovery less.
If it is software, the first thing to do is clone the disk using something likeddrescue. If this works it us a software issue and you can continue below.
On the copy, run testdisk to scan the drive and try find filesystem signatures and rebuild partitions based on the location of those.
davidgo
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A first measure should be to examine the state of your disk. As the disk is detectable, you could examine its SMART status, on this computer (if this wasn't the boot disk) or on another computer (inside an enclosure). You could use a product such as Speccy that will indicate whether the found data is good or bad news.
If you decide to try and recover the disk, you could use TestDisk, which is a free product that may be able to help.
However, if you have irreplaceable data on the disk, you will need to recover it before you modify anything on it.
You may try MiniTool Data Recovery Software Free, which saved me a couple of times. It will search for files on the disk, but won't modify the disk itself.
harrymc
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