Spanned Partition Recovery

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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lilkaniggit
Posts: 2
Joined: 17 Apr 2013, 19:39

Spanned Partition Recovery

#1 Post by lilkaniggit »

Long story ahead... bear with me.

So I got a new computer. I had a 500GB hard drive already, so I used it. I partitioned it like so:
HD0: 100MB (system reserved) -- 30GB (OS) -- ~440GB (data)

I had multiple backups of old systems I have through the years and decided to finally go through all the data and consolidate it into one place (the data partition). I made good progress, about 100GB of data on the data partition. Then decided to get another hard drive, a 1TB.

In the Disk Management Console, I selected the 1TB drive and decided to make a spanned partition with the HD0:data partition. So, to the user now the partitions looked like:
HD0: 100MB (system reserved) -- 30GB (OS) -- ~1.4TB (data)

Next, quite possibly the worst decision I have made in a few years... I deleted the spanned partition, which took the old HD0:data partition with it. So, at this point I have unallocated space where the data partition was.

I tried using TestDisk to recover the partition. It found it, but it sees the partition as ~1.4TB, not as just the ~440GB (so it sees the spanned partition). It will not recover the partition, saying the hard drive is too small.

I know... pretty bad. But I will say, your software is awesome and is one of few so far that can even see the old partition.

Is there a way to recover only the HD0:data partition? The 1TB never had any data transferred to it.

Thanks in advance for any help!
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lilkaniggit
Posts: 2
Joined: 17 Apr 2013, 19:39

Re: Spanned Partition Recovery

#2 Post by lilkaniggit »

Should I recreate the spanned partition without formatting?

Could I change the drive geometry so that the error won't show, then restore the files it finds (if it worked)?

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