How to create a partition without destroying

[DonDCajun]

The last time I rebooted my xp pro 64 PC, the partition on a 6 TB GPT disk (raid 5 with 4 2-TB drives) was gone. Windows Disk management recognizes the correct amount of space on the drive, but shows the drive needs to be initialized and a partition created.

Norton's Partition Manager 8.0 and Easeus's Partition Master Pro 6.1 demo, and Paragon's Partition Manager 11 personal Demo, and others, see only 1.5xxx TB of space.

Active@ Partition Recovery sees the correct 5.8 binary TB's of space. A normal version scan reviewed over 2TB of space since last night and has not found the previous partition. Believing the partition info should be in the beginning of the drive, I killed that scan and started its more in depth scan. As I write this, it has gone through more than 40gb of space without finding the partition.

I use this drive to store backups (Norton Ghost images) of my laptop and my other desktop. I am having issues with my laptop and really don't want to loose the images of it.

It looks like I am going to have to re-create the partition and then use a file recovery app to see if I can recover any of the back up images. Most of the back images are very large files ranging from 20 to almost 250 gigs.

1) Any other ideas?

2) What is the best way to create the original partition without destroying the files there?

 

[4Ryan6]

http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1

 

[DonDCajun]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried PCInspector, but it did only recognized 1.4tb of my 6tb GPT array/drive. Further research turned up Active@ Partition Recovery, http://www.partition-recovery.com/.

Of the 4 Partition recovery apps I tested, it is the only one that saw my full 6tb partition. It took an advances scan of over 32 hours, but eventually found my original partition and ranked recovery of it as excellent. It even found the original partition when the array had only 3 2-tb drive.

I ran the scan with the demo version, but after the scan results, I bought the full license, downloaded the pro version, reloaded the scan results into it and it worked. It recovered all my files, including the backup image of my laptop, which allowed me to do a restore of it as well.

 

[4Ryan6]

^ That's great, PCInspector is obviously behind on drive size recovery with all the new large capacity HDDs hitting the market, they'll probably release an update eventually to cover larger sized recoveries.

That's nice to know so I don't recommend it for a situation like yours, until they update the recovery size capability.

It would have been great if it would have worked for you, as you wouldn't have had to pay for the recovery, Glad you recovered all your files!