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Recently, I accidentally deleted a partition off of my external hard disk. I had a copy of Minitool Power Data Recovery left over when the same drive had become RAW about a year ago. When I selected lost partition recovery, it immediately identified my deleted partition and allowed me to access and recover the files that were there.

My question is this. Is there any way to change the deleted partition back to NTFS without having to have a drive that you need to recover the files to and then move them back after formatting, as I don’t have any space left on either the computer or on my other external hard drive, so that I don’t need to buy a new one. The files on the disk were really important.

I am using Windows 7 Home Premium.

I appreciate any help in solving this crisis.

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As someone who has used TestDisk to recover a corrupted partition table, I would highly recommend it.

First of all, it is in your best interest to not utilize the disk until you have performed recovery. This is to reduce the possibility of overwriting data on the disk which you will be attempting to recover. Also, I would recommend reading through the documentation and tutorials on the TestDisk website. It is best to understand the process of recovery before attempting to recover your disk. I've utilized this tool to successfully recover one of my disks on two separate occasions, as well as a few more disks for others. It's a surprisingly simple tool to use.

The general idea is that the TestDisk tool can perform a quick scan of the disk, which will recover recently lost partition data, followed by a deep scan of the disk which will scan for partition header data. If artifacts remain on the disk it will mention these after the scan completes. Mind you, this process takes some time and depends on the size of the disk you are attempting recovery on.

In the event that TestDisk itself is insufficient and cannot recover the partition, you could also utilize PhotoRec to perform data carving operations. This means that instead of looking for partition headers, the tool will scan for various types of file headers and recover the artifacts. Unfortunately, this will require an additional drive to write recovered artifacts to. Also, I've noticed that this process will recover individual frames of a video file as .jpg images, potentially bloating the recovery size.

Escalating your recovery attempts to this step again will require some financial expense on your part to supply an adequately sized disk to recover files to.

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  • As someone in same situation ans the OP i tried to use TestDisk in deleted 1TB partition. To say it is unsatisfactory is understatement of the year. Quick scan took forever and none of the attempts finished, as computer froze every time i ran it except one i aborted. Is it worth it to continue attempts to recover partition? Or just give up and recover files since this is much faster?
    – AcePL
    Commented Dec 11, 2019 at 1:21
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After doing some research, I found out that Test Disk recreates the partition tables of many disk formats, which work when a drive is deleted. You have to choose the Intel partition format. If Linux file systems were previously residing, they too will be recovered, but you can delete and merge them with EaseUs partition manager.

If you have any problems, please feel free to comment.

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