Tashiba Canvio 1TB External hard disk - storage space lost

[knvntvm]

Request assistance. Toshiba Canvio 1.0 TB external hard drive. I had created 4 partitions.
I have opted a blank partitioned area (E) to create Recovery image (create Recovery DVD) for my Lenovo ThinkCenter Edge Desktop. The program warned me that everything on the disk will be lost; I thought everything on E will be lost and proceeded. On completion, I realized that everything has been erased (including all partitions) and the Windows Explorer said that the External HDD contained only 32GB, of which some part has been used for the recovery image! I then decided to discard the recovery image to make the HDD blank and recover all the storage space. Deleting the data did not help, and therefor I have reformatted (did the full reformat, not the quick reformat) the HDD. However, even now Windows Explorer is showing only 32 GB in the external hard disk.
How do I recover the whole 1 TB and what program should I use to achieve this?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there knvntvm,

Just go to Disk Management -> delete the partition(right click on it) -> create new ones.
Apart from that, you can start with using some partition recovery software and see whether you will get something back. Though, you have done some reformatting as well as created some partition. It is highly possible that the data is overwritten.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[knvntvm]

Thank you. I opened the Disk Management utility (by pressing ⊞ Win+R and typed diskmgmt.msc) and noticed that though the disk 1 contained 1TB (usable appx 950 GB), only 32GB was partitioned and allocated to E. As instructed I deleted E and then created 4 separate partitions. All well now. Yes, my existing data was lost (but fortunately, I have all that on the system HDD and can now back up again). Thank you for the timely tip.
Best regards
knvntvm

 

[D_Know_WD]

I'm glad I was able to help out.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[kedwa30]

Gparted is a partition editing software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you have received all the help you need, please select the appropriate options to remove your question from the 'Seeking Assistance' list. Thanks! You can make a recovery CD that you can boot to using a lite version of Linux for in case windows fails you. In the case of malware which could be designed to infiltrate even the windows recovery partition, you will want to have a recovery CD on hand. Using a different OS for the recovery is a good strategy to avoid activating any windows malware during your recovery attempts. Also, you can hardly boot windows from a CD! (Except Windows CE, 95, 3.1 etc.)
From the looks of it, you already solved your problem and are no longer seeking assistance. However, it also appears that windows had over-written the partitions when it created your recovery info. Why this happened, I don't know. Will this happen again? I don't know. What I do know is that you can run windows as a virtual machine and in doing so, it could be restricted to writing to a virtual drive and then it can only destroy virtual partitions within a single file rather than taking down a whole drive as it did.
Look into Xen and 'bare metal hypervisors' to learn how to run windows as a virtual machine, thus locking it into a sandbox where the harm it can cause will be limited.