How to Recover Lost Partition on External Hard Drive

How to recover lost partition on external hard drive? Here are the top two ways provided to rescue your lost partition and data on the external hard drive.

Lora

By Lora / Updated on December 11, 2022

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Is there any tool I can recover the lost partition on an external hard drive?

“I have a 500 GB external hard drive that I keep duplicates of all my data that's on my laptop with one exception... My music. I believe sometime last week, I lost power to the drive when it was running a virus scan. When I reconnected the drive all it will tell me is it needs to be reformatted. What is the best tool for Windows 10 to help me recover my music?

Generally, an external hard disk is a storage device used to store, transfer, and backup data among different systems.

External hard drives can also be divided into several partitions like an internal hard disk. All the information about partitions is saved on the partition table on the external drive. There is a danger that partitions could be lost from outside the hard drive due to different reasons. To perform external hard drive partition recovery, you may need a partition recovery tool. There are multiple partition recovery software to restore lost partitions. 

Reliable partition recovery software-recover lost partition on an external hard drive

In Disk Management or File Explorer, the lost partition does not appear when partition information including partition type or location is removed from the operating system. But it never disappears and could be restored somewhere on the external hard disk.

Restoring lost, deleted or damaged partitions from an external hard drive isn’t a big issue if you use a professional partition recovery tool such as AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard, a featured utility of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, an all-around partition manager, will be your first choice to recover lost partitions on an external hard drive.

Highlights of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional:
❤❤❤❤
Powerful functionalities: AOMEI Partition Assistant supports to convert MBR and GPT without partition removal, move partition, clone partition, merge partition, large-scale hard drive format (over 32GB) to FAT32, allocate space free from FAT42, creek partition, delete partition formats, change drive letters and extend partition.
Easy-to-use: Designed with a concise and simple interface.
Compatible: All Windows systems supported: Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP, etc.

Before you recover the lost partition on the external hard drive

Before you start recovering your partition, please keep the following tips in mind to avoid further data loss before recovering the partition and ensure great results:

✪ Do not perform any new operation on the external hard drive.
✪ Do not reformat the external hard drive.
✪ Do not copy new files to the external hard drive.
✪ Do not rebuild the partition table of the external hard drive.

Four steps to perform external hard drive partition recovery

To recover lost partition on an external hard drive via AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, follow the steps detailed below. You can download the demo version first.

Try Demo Version Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

Step 1: Download & install AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Select Partition Recovery Wizard on the left panel and click the disk you want to recover. Click on “Next” to proceed.

partition-recovery-wizard

Step 2: Select a search mode. Choose one and click “Next”. (It’s recommended to choose Fast Search the first time as it takes less time than Full Search).

partition-fast-search-mode

Step 3: Waiting for the search stage to end, the lost or deleted partitions will be listed. Choose the one that you want to restore and click “Proceed”.

select-lost-partition

Step 4: When you receive the message “the partitions have been recovered successfully”, click “Finish” to exit. Then, open Disk Management or go to Windows File Explorer to check whether your lost partitions get back.

partition-recovery-finished

Notes:✎...
After recovering the partition, the data in the lost partition will be recovered as well. However, if you want to recover data from a formatted, corrupted partition, it is advised to turn to professional data recovery software for help.
AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is only compatible with Windows 10/8.1/8/7, XP, and Vista. You can use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server to recover partitions in Windows Server2019/2016/2012 (R2)/2008 (R2).
If you want to find deleted files from external hard drives only, you need a professional data recovery tool-MyRecover instead of partition recovery software/

 

Recover lost partition on external hard drive via Command Prompt

If the Windows File Explorer does not recognize an external hard drive partition due to a lack of the drive letter, you can use Diskpart Command to assign a drive letter to the lost partition on the external hard drive to make it visible again.

Step 1: Press “Win + R” and type “diskmgmt.msc” in the Run window to find the lost partition in Disk Management. (If a partition is deleted, the volume will be marked as Unallocated. Remember the partition size.)

Step 2: Press “Win + R” and type "diskpart", then hit the “Enter” key to open the Diskpart utility.

Step 3: Type "list disk" and hit Enter (Replace # with the number of the hard disk that contains the lost partition).

Step 4: Type "list volume" and hit Enter. You will see all volumes on the disk.

Step 5: Type "select volume #" and hit Enter (replace # with the number of the lost partition).

Step 6: Type "assign letter=#" and hit Enter (Replace # with an available drive letter, from C to Z).

command-prompt-recover-lost-partition

Conclusion

This post shared the top two easiest methods to recover lost partitions on external hard drives. You can avoid much frustration by mistakenly deleting the partition once you learn how to get the lost partition via AOMEI Partition Recover Wizard. This partition recovery software can help you solve other partition issues with powerful features as well. Of course, always backing up essential files in a secured storage device is the best way to keep your vital data safe. It's recomended to use backup freeware-AOMEI Backupper.

Lora
Lora · Editor
Lora is an editor of AOMEI Technology. She is also a tester and editor of AOMEI Data Recovery Tools. -- "Keep testing, write the most useful tutorials for helping people recover the lost data for Windows and phones" is the most meaningful thing for her. Dedicated to creating helpful tutorials, she hopes her tutorial can assist users to effortlessly solve data loss problems on their personal computers and mobile phones.