Hi,
Last night I extended a partition on my 4TB Samsung 990 PRO and now I can't access anything on the entire drive and have spent pretty much the whole day today troubleshooting to no avail so I am hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can shed some light on further ways to proceed without losing the data should that still be possible.
The drive in question is split into a few different partitions that I mainly use for storage and sorting various things. I have one partition for games, one for video editing projects and other media, one for general backup, etc. I have a separate 1TB NVMe that I use as my C drive which contains everything OS related, program files etc.
I extended the Games partition with a couple hundred extra GBs to install a game last night, and the Disk Manager threw a popup at me. I can't remember exactly what it said but it was something along the lines of the action resulting in the drive being rendered impossible to boot an OS from. I thought that wasn't a problem as the drive isn't being booted from so I dismissed the notification and completed the extension. I noticed that the "bar" above all partitions on the drive changed from blue to yellow once the extension had finished, but IIRC it always looked like that when I used HDDs so I thought nothing of it as everything seemed to work fine. I installed the game, played for a bit and then shut the PC down.
When I booted it up today all partitions from that drive are gone from Explorer, completely inaccessible. A reboot did nothing, still gone. A bit of googling and troubleshooting led me to the conclusion that I must've accidentally made the disk dynamic. I found a thread on this forum where someone had a similar issue and solved it by using DMDE's "insert partition" function. I tried this and the partitions reappeared in Explorer after a reboot, but after the next reboot they were gone again. Between these reboots, I created a new partition (to replace one that I deleted during troubleshooting) but other than that I can't remember doing anything of significance regarding the partitions/drive.
Using MiniTool's Partition Wizard I can see the partitions and their names but they have no drive letters. I have deleted the Games partition and a couple of other ones I'm not too concerned about losing but the 3 remaining ones can be seen below. I've tried assigning drive letters via MiniTool but it won't work, the process appears to work fine but as soon as it is finished the letter is gone again.
In Disk Manager it now looks like this, the partitions are there but they have no information whatsoever:
When I try to assign them a letter through here I get this error:
The partitions also show up when I do "list partition" in Diskpart but they do not show up as volumes and I've thus not been able to run chkdsk on them (I tried the GUID method but it said "cannot open volume for direct access")
I'm not sure how to proceed from here. From what I can gather in MiniTools and DMDE, the folders are still intact on the partitions so the data seems to still be there. I'm quite keen to solve this without formatting the entire drive, as the Media and Backup partitions contain 10+ years' worth of things I would like to save. I've deleted and formatted the least important partitions hoping it would solve something, but to no avail. When comparing my storage drive with the C drive I noticed the storage drive does not have the EFI and reserved partitions, should these be there even if the drive doesn't have windows on it? Is it possible that they may have been deleted somehow in the process and if so, is there any way to restore them?
Does anyone have any ideas about what may have caused this and how to proceed from here? Any tips or guidance with further troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks,
Last night I extended a partition on my 4TB Samsung 990 PRO and now I can't access anything on the entire drive and have spent pretty much the whole day today troubleshooting to no avail so I am hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can shed some light on further ways to proceed without losing the data should that still be possible.
The drive in question is split into a few different partitions that I mainly use for storage and sorting various things. I have one partition for games, one for video editing projects and other media, one for general backup, etc. I have a separate 1TB NVMe that I use as my C drive which contains everything OS related, program files etc.
I extended the Games partition with a couple hundred extra GBs to install a game last night, and the Disk Manager threw a popup at me. I can't remember exactly what it said but it was something along the lines of the action resulting in the drive being rendered impossible to boot an OS from. I thought that wasn't a problem as the drive isn't being booted from so I dismissed the notification and completed the extension. I noticed that the "bar" above all partitions on the drive changed from blue to yellow once the extension had finished, but IIRC it always looked like that when I used HDDs so I thought nothing of it as everything seemed to work fine. I installed the game, played for a bit and then shut the PC down.
When I booted it up today all partitions from that drive are gone from Explorer, completely inaccessible. A reboot did nothing, still gone. A bit of googling and troubleshooting led me to the conclusion that I must've accidentally made the disk dynamic. I found a thread on this forum where someone had a similar issue and solved it by using DMDE's "insert partition" function. I tried this and the partitions reappeared in Explorer after a reboot, but after the next reboot they were gone again. Between these reboots, I created a new partition (to replace one that I deleted during troubleshooting) but other than that I can't remember doing anything of significance regarding the partitions/drive.
Using MiniTool's Partition Wizard I can see the partitions and their names but they have no drive letters. I have deleted the Games partition and a couple of other ones I'm not too concerned about losing but the 3 remaining ones can be seen below. I've tried assigning drive letters via MiniTool but it won't work, the process appears to work fine but as soon as it is finished the letter is gone again.
In Disk Manager it now looks like this, the partitions are there but they have no information whatsoever:
When I try to assign them a letter through here I get this error:
The partitions also show up when I do "list partition" in Diskpart but they do not show up as volumes and I've thus not been able to run chkdsk on them (I tried the GUID method but it said "cannot open volume for direct access")
I'm not sure how to proceed from here. From what I can gather in MiniTools and DMDE, the folders are still intact on the partitions so the data seems to still be there. I'm quite keen to solve this without formatting the entire drive, as the Media and Backup partitions contain 10+ years' worth of things I would like to save. I've deleted and formatted the least important partitions hoping it would solve something, but to no avail. When comparing my storage drive with the C drive I noticed the storage drive does not have the EFI and reserved partitions, should these be there even if the drive doesn't have windows on it? Is it possible that they may have been deleted somehow in the process and if so, is there any way to restore them?
Does anyone have any ideas about what may have caused this and how to proceed from here? Any tips or guidance with further troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks,
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