Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Recovering partition after initializing by mistake

I recently re installed windows, i have 2 drives, i have removed the second drive to keep the data safe.
After the installation i have connected my hard drive. I didn't find the drive appearing in file explorer. When i opened Computer Management-> Disk Management, i received message saying that the drive is not initialized, so i followed the steps to initialize it, thinking that this will restore the drive and the data, then i found that the drive now has the state of un-allocated and the next available options is to create volumes, then i realized that i may have destroyed my data.
Looking online i found some forums talking about something similar and that MiniTool Partition wizard have recovery wizard that can recover the drive
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/288692-disk-1-unknown-not-initialized-unallocated.html

I gave it a try, downloaded the free tool from http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html, then selected the drive, started the recovery wizard, did the quick scan, and voila, the partition was recovered. That was really great tool that saved my data.