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Partitions visible from AOMEI but not WinPartMgr! Can't create drive letters!

edited February 2014 in AOMEI Products Support

HELP!


Short story: AOMEI sees I have two partitions on one physical drive, one containing all my recovered data, the other empty waiting for me to move my data to it. The Windows Partition Manager reports the ENTIRE drive as unallocated & unformatted. AOEMI shows the partitions but no drive letters. When I try to assign drive letters, it fails and tells me to use the WPM. Help!



Long story: About 2 weeks ago, my primary 1TB *data* drive crashed (64bit Windows 7 is installed on a separate 120GB SSD drive), taking about 850GB of data with it. The ONLY way I was able to recover the data was to use a free Linux based tool called "Redo". It found the raw files, but could ONLY restore them to a USB device, so I bought a 2TB drive and placed it in an external enclosure. The result was 310,000 files with filenames like "f123456.bmp". It took me two weeks to open nearly every file, identify it (it if wasn't corrupt), and give it a name.


But there was a problem, upon reconnecting the drive "normally" to one of my SATA ports, Windows (7) did not see the partition, showing the entire drive as Unallocated and unformatted. Reconnecting the drive to my USB port, everything was back to normal. About 450GB of recovered data with no place to put it while I make the drive accessable connected to a SATA port (via formatting from Windows.)


So using AOMEI, with no other drive available, I created a 1TB partition on the same 2TB drive. I planned on copying all of my recovered files to the new partition, connect to SATA, format the "old" partition using Windows so I was assured it would see it, then moving everything back.


I shutdown, connected the drive to my SATA port and rebooted Windows. The Windows Partition Magager detected both partitions (but still reported them as unallocatedunformatted). Using WPM, I formatted the new empty partition.


I then Shutdown, reconnected the drive to my USB port and rebooted to discover BOTH partitions GONE with Windows reporting the ENTIRE drive as unformatted. ARGH! All my work for the past two weeks gone?


I launched AOMEI and it (fortunately) still detects both partitions (only when connected via USB though), but with no drive letters, so I can't open them to access the files. When I attempt to assign drive letters using AOMEI, it fails and tells me to use the WPM which only sees one big unallocated partition!


How do I access my recovered files again??? HELP!!!


PS: I'm using the free version of AOMEI, but would gladly purchase the full version if it can fix this problem.

Comments

  • Hello Mugsy,


    As for your problem, I suggest you use Partition Assistnat to clone the partition which contains data to another location, after that you may access your data on the new location. Otherwise you may have to use data recovery software.


    Best Regards,

    Kim

  • edited February 2014

    Thanks for the reply.


    I tried to copy the partition to another partition on the same drive (the second partition mentioned above), but when complete, it failed to create a drive letter on that partition as well. Is that because I used the same physical drive?


    If I purchase another seperate drive and copy to it, should that work?

  • edited February 2014

    UPDATE: I purchased a second physical drive (1TB) to copy my partition to, but AOMEI reports: "The bytes per sector on the source and destination disk are not equal".


    The source partition (NTFS) uses standard 4K sectors. The destination drive in unallocated.


    Help!

  • Hello,


    Actually our software will directly call windows command to assign drive letter. I suppose the reason of failed to create drive letter may because of specifical computer circumstance, it is a small probability event while it's not because the partitions are on the same hard disk. Besides, your disk become unformatted or unallocated while you connect it as internal disk may be because of low voltage or the connection is not stable.


    As for "The bytes per sector on the source and destination disk are not equal". The two hard disk are two different format standard disk, I suppose your destination disk use standard 512 bytes sectors. You have to choose another hard disk which use the standard 4K sectors. 


    Best Regards,

    Kim



  • Thanks for the reply, but as I stated, both drives were formatted as NTFS with 4K sectors (but for some reason, AOMEI can't tell after the partition is removed and the drive is unallocated.)


    It appears the error message itself is in error and that the reason for the refusal to copy is that the source drive and destination drive are "physically" not the same size (2TB vs 1TB) even though the partition I'm trying to copy is less than 1TB.

  • Hi,


    What you said "both drives were formatted as NTFS with 4K sectors" maybe mean cluster size, while this error "The bytes per sector on the source and destination disk are not equal" is refer to the size of per sector. Please follow the steps to check the size of per sector: You could click Start--in the search box, type in
    Msinfo32.exe, next, select component--storage--disk, then in the right
    section you could find the value of sector/bytes, if the values are different thus you can not do the operation.


    If you have any other qustions or suggestions please feel free to let us know.

    Best Regards,
    Kim
    AOMEI Support Team

  • Since the "Copy Partition" function only works if the destination is "unallocated" and "unformatted", "sector size" should not matter.


    As noted above, I believe the "real" problem was that the destination drive was smaller than the source drive (though larger than the source PARTITION.)


    I have since simply started over with fresh partitions both recognized by Windows.

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