Partition Recovery Concepts
What to do? When:
- Partition is not visible (disk is attached, but you don't see a drive letter in file explorer)
- Partition is not accessible (volume is visible, but Operating System pops up an error when accessing it)
- Partition is not bootable (Operating System fails to start properly)
The most common causes of partition issues:
- Physical damage of critical sectors on a HDD (known as unreadable or 'bad sectors')
- Loss of information due to an electrical failure or power surge
- Accidental deletion of the logical drive/partition
- Accidental formatting of the logical disk/partition
- Damage of the MBR, Partition Table, Volume Boot Sectors by a software virus or malware
- Improper use or execution failures of backup/recovery software tools
When the volume is damaged it usually displays one of the following symptoms:
- Original partition/drive is no longer visible to the Operating System (deleted, damaged, or overwritten)
- Partition/Volume is visible but important files/folders are not visible (drive re-formatted or damaged)
In both cases partition recovery software must analyze the surface of the physical drive for residual logical data and organization clues in order to reconstruct the partition/drive parameters (such as the first sector number, cluster size, file system type, etc.). After a user obtains an access to this virtual drive, he is able to re-create partition (recover partition information) or just to copy lost data to another drive (with use of a file recovery program).
Volume Recovery Procedures:
- Master Boot Record (MBR) is damaged
- Partition is deleted or Partition Table is damaged
- Partition Boot Sector is damaged
- Missing or corrupted System Files
Examples of low level partition damage and recovery procedures
We assume that you have some knowledge of a HDD and the File System's organization to be able to understand the data recovery terminology and examples above. If not, please read about Hardware and Disk Organization first.