How to recover lost or deleted partition on external hard drive? Try CMD or one powerful partition recovery software like AOMEI Partition Assistant.
“I have a 500 GB external hard drive on which I keep duplicates of all my data 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 told me was that it needed to be reformatted. All my favorite music is there, and I don't want to lose it. How can I recover lost partition on an external hard drive?
- Question from Reddit
External hard drives can also be divided into multiple partitions for storing files and folders. However, you may lose your data or partition for different reasons, such as accidental deletion, disk formatting error, virus infection, corrupted partition tables, etc.
Fortunately, it's possible to recover lost partition on external hard drive with one powerful partition recovery software - AOMEI Partition Assistant. The files on external hard drive will be recovered as well. In addition, your partition may not be lost, just the drive letter. You can try to assign a new drive letter to your partition to make it visible.
Although you can't see the lost partition in Disk Management or File Explorer, it still exists on the external hard drive and can be recovered if you don't create a new partition with it. Meanwhile, please stop using this external hard drive to avoid data overwriting.
The easiest way to recover lost, deleted, or damaged partitions from an external hard drive is by using a professional partition recovery software such as AOMEI Partition Assistant. It's embedded with the Partition Recovery wizard and offers two advanced scanning methods to scan your disk completely.
A reliable partition recovery software for Windows 7, 8/8.1, 10, 11, and server.
Before you start recovering your partition, please keep the followingtipsto avoid further data loss:
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.
Step 1. Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and open it after installing. Select Recover > Partition Recovery and select the disk containing the lost partition.
Step 2. Select a search method. It’s recommended to choose Fast Search the first time as it takes less time than Full Search.
Step 3. It will list all the lost or deleted partitions after scanning. Choose the lost partition on external hard drive and click Proceed.
Wait patiently until you receive the message “the partitions have been recovered successfully”, and click Finish to exit. Then, check whether your lost partitions get back in Disk Management or File Explorer. More surprisingly, the data in the lost partition will be recovered as well.
If you can't see a partition in File Explorer but it displays in Disk Management, likely that this partition does not have a drive letter. In this case, you can choose to assign a drive letter using the DiskPart tool and make your lost partition visible again.
Step 1. Press Win + R and type diskmgmt.msc in the Run window. In Disk Management, the deleted partition will be marked as Unallocated. Be sure to remember the size of lost partition.
Step 2. Press Win + R and type diskpart to open the Diskpart utility.
Step 3. Then, type the following command lines, pressing Enter after each line.
In general, your files on the lost partition will be recovered as well. However, sometimes your files may still be missing after partition recovery. Or your actual problem is accidentally deleted files on external hard drive instead of lost partition.
Anyway, you can try simple & easy to use data recovery software - AOMEI FastRecovery, designed by AOMEI, the leading benchmark of the data security industry. Below are its outstanding features.
Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to the computer properly. Open AOMEI FastRecovery after installing. Then, hover the mouse over external hard drive, and click Scan.
Step 2. AOMEI FastRecovery will perform a Quick Scan automatically to find all the recoverable files and display all files by Type or Path, and supports sorting through multiple options.
📍📍📍Notes:
✅ For specific files or folders, type the file name or the extension in the search box. Or click the filter button to specify the data type (e.g., Images).
✅ Click the Deep Scan button if the Quick Scan fails to locate the desired files. Deep Scan searches every sector of the disk to find more files.
Step 3. Preview and choose the files you want to restore. Then, click Recover and choose a new destination to save deleted files. Restoring files to the original location may cause data overwriting.
AOMEI Partition Assistant is a powerful partition recovery software that can recover lost partition on external hard drive, resize partition, extend partition, etc., in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, etc. The files are also recovered.
If you don't care about the partition, only about files, try data recovery software - AOMEI FastRecovery. You can recover deleted files in 3 simple steps, with a high success rate and fast speed. It supports more than 1000 data types, such as Word/Excel/PPT documents, MOV videos, JPG/PNG images, etc.