How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Primary Partition in Windows 10?

“What happens if I delete primary partition?”

Head to Disk Management by right-clicking on the “Start” menu; you will probably find some partitions marked as “Primary partition”.

If so, then it can be implied that you are using an MBR hard drive, because “Primary partition” is a concept to describe a division on an MBR or BIOS hard drive.

If you have deleted primary partition, you might get into some problems. Some users have accidentally deleted a partition in Windows 10 and found things went wrong.

It turns out that the removed partition was a primary partition. Then what is primary partition? And how to recover deleted partition safely?

What is a primary partition?

MBR drives and GPT drives have different partition structures. MBR-based devices are usually divided into only 4 basic or standard partitions, called “Primary partitions”.

Primary partitions assist users in saving and getting access to the files and Windows. The BIOS uses one primary partition to load the Operating System and needs it to boot.

This primary partition must be set as “Active” and should be the only “Active” partition. Otherwise, the computer will be unbootable. If you have accidentally deleted Windows 10 boot partition, it will also fail to start your computer.

Generally, it is the C: drive that is in charge of the startup process and is set as “Active”.

Primary partition vs. logical partition

Besides the primary partitions, you may discover some extra “logical partitions”. Actually, the primary and logical partitions are not concepts on the same level.

As mentioned above, a storage device is usually divided into 4 primary partitions and can be separated into 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition.

Due to the limit, the MBR partition table only occupies 64 bytes of storage space, and every primary partition takes up 16 bytes. That’s far from enough for users to store different types of data.

So, extended partitions are to help. One extended partition can be divided into several logical partitions to meet users’ needs.

On the contrary, on a GPT-based drive, there are no “Primary partitions” for MBR support up to four primary partitions, but GPT has no limit. 

So, all the partitions on a GPT-based drive are primary partitions, and are often called “Basic Data Partitions”.

Having a basic image of MBR and GPT would also be helpful if you need to clone MBR to GPT disk.

What happens if I delete primary partition?

Primary partitions conclude the active partition, other data partitions, and the recovery partition, so it cannot be said that it is 100% okay to delete a primary partition.

But one cannot commonly delete a primary partition in use. That is to say, a user cannot delete an active partition for the Windows operating system installed on it.

So, it is safe to say that if you have accidentally deleted a partition that is marked as “Primary”, it must be a basic data partition.

Correspondingly, you will lose all the data stored on it. All the files, items, and anything important will be inaccessible after deletion.

However, it is normal and, of course, okay to delete all the primary partitions on the drive if you plan to reinstall Windows. Windows will take care of everything and create all the needed partitions during installation.

How to restore accidentally deleted primary partition?

If you have deleted a primary partition that stores data, then you have to deal with the data loss.

Actually, it is tough for a normal user to get primary partitions back on their own. But no worries, an excellent primary partition recovery tool is about to help.

You might have heard about the “recover” command line, but it has strict limits: it can only restore lost files from the hard drive; what’s worse, it can merely recover one file at a time.

So, never waste your time using a complex command-line app, but turn to professional and easy recovery software -

AOMEI Partition Assistant, supported by a sophisticated team with over 10 years of data recovery app development experience, is competitive, convenient, and compatible.

Competitive. It is supported by a sophisticated team with advanced tech. 

Convenient. It is easy to use, requiring no expertise. 

Compatible. It is available on Windows 11/10/8/7/Vista/XP. 

Using this tool, you could easily retrieve accidentally deleted primary partitions from external/internal storage devices, like SSD/HDD/USB/SD card.

 It supports Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista, all users could use it to scan hard disks for deleted partitions. Now download AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro Demo to enjoy.

Notes:✎...

Stop using your affected hard disk after deletion to maximize the recovery rate.

Step 1. Run AOMEI Partition Assistant > “Partition recovery wizard” > select the affected drive > “Next”.

Step 2. Select a search method to locate the deleted partitions. “Fast Search” is recommended for the first time to save your time. If failed, try “Full Search”.

Step 3. Choose the detected partitions you need to restore > “Proceed”.

Thus you could restore deleted primary partition securely and easily. As a very versatile tool, you could also use it to recover data from formatted hard drives.

FAQ about partition recovery

This tutorial introduces info about primary partitions, and how to restore deleted primary partition if you have deleted one. In case you may meet other similar or relevant questions, here we provided some more info.