[kuma781]

I accidentally erased a partition on my 5 terabyte drive. Says its still there...And that's its not formatted correctly. formatting would erase my precisions data! Can you help??

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Says its still there...

 

 

What says its still there.

 

What OS are you running, Windows 10 - 11 or something else.

[phillpower2]

Says its still there...

 

 

What says its still there.

 

What OS are you running, Windows 10 - 11 or something else.

[Kemasa]

How exactly did you "erase" it?

 

If you just deleted the partition entry, then it is possible to add it. The issue is that I am not sure that the Windoze tools can be used as it does additional things, which you really don't want to do as it will wipe out the data since it will format the partition.

 

It is at this point it should be mentioned that you should have backups, both for you and other readers.

 

I am more of a Unix/Linux person and know the tools for those platforms, as well know that some of the needed tools are not available under Windoze.

 

The best thing to do is to mirror the device onto an identical disk. It is possible to use one that it close to the same as well, but not always. You can then use the mirrored device to restore the partition, but if it isn't quite the same, then the block needed might not be available.

 

There are several tools you can use, but the easiest might be to create a Knoppix live disk. It can be a DVD or a USB thumb drive. Then you would need to boot from the device, which may require changes to your bios settings to boot from a disk other than the main disk, it all depends on what it is set to.

 

The command line tool I would tend to use is fdisk, but that it because I am familiar with it. It needs to be run from the root account. So you would need to open a shell window (much like command tool), then type "sudo tcsh" to become root. If you have only one disk on the system it will be easier. You can type "fdisk -l" to see all of the disks and see which one you need to modify.

 

The problem is that you need to know the starting block of the partition which was removed and how large it was. If all the space on the disk in that section is allocated, then it is easier. But you do need to be careful to not make more of a mess of it.

 

To edit the partition table, you would type "fdisk /dev/sdX" where X is the disk. Often it is "a", but when you boot from the DVD or thumbdrive it very well could be different. The output from the "fdisk -l" should indicate which device it is considered when booted under Knoppix. The first command would be "p", then return, which will print out the partition table. To create a partition, you would type "c", but then it will ask you questions which are hard to guess. You will be asked which partition you want to create and the starting block, then the size or ending block. After doing that, you can then print it out again to see if it look correct. Once you are sure, you can type "w", return to write the partition table (there is no going back after that). Then "q" to quite fdisk.

 

Then you should be able to reboot the system and it should prompt you to remove the Knoppix device.

 

It is likely that you may have to do this in steps and report back, so it could take a long time due to the nature of getting support here. In person is obviously a lot easier and faster.

[kuma781]

im using amazing partition manager. It shows a greyed out section of "unallocated" 3.2 terabytes