How to Recover Deleted Volume on External Hard Drive?

“How do I recover deleted volume on external hard drive?”

External hard drives are small, portable, and convenient. People use external hard drives as important data/file storage devices or backup devices. To store different types of data, and out of convenience, external hard drives are divided into several parts.

Generally, we call it partitions or volumes. Some users will set a partition to store data, another to save backups, etc.

It seems that something occurred to this user. The user in this case accidentally deleted partitions on an external hard drive with Disk Management. But actually, inadvertent deletion is not a rare case among external hard drive users.

The question comes out here: is it possible to recover deleted volume on external hard drive?

Can a deleted volume be recovered?

When deleting a partition in Disk Management, you may find it becomes disappeared or unallocated. At this time, some users, perhaps, are going to format it or trying to recreate a new partition.

Attention please, this is very dangerous for your deleted volumes and data! Do not try to do any more operations to the external hard drive, or the volumes will be overwritten, and all the data will be gone for good.

Because the data will be logically deleted when you delete a partition in Disk Management, and the space left will be marked as “unallocated”, waiting for new data to overwrite.

Vice versa, the deleted volume can get recovered as long as no more operations are done to the external hard drive after deletion.

Then, you need to perform unallocated partition recovery. So, how to recover lost partition on external hard drive?

How to recover deleted volume on external hard drive?

To recover deleted volume with a higher success rate, some important preparations are necessary before moving on to the solution.

Beforehand: prevent further data loss

If you want to recover lost partition on external hard drive with the data in it kept, these are of vital importance.

• Do not try to reformat the unallocated space.
• Do not add more files to the deleted volume.
• Never try to rebuild the partition table.
• Do not try to create new partitions.
• Do not use the “assign letter” command to give a name to the volume.

In a nutshell, please stop using the external hard drive right after deletion. Now please follow the tutorial to perform lost volume recovery.

Tutorial: recover deleted volume on external hard disk

Some users may take risks to utilize CMD to recover their deleted partitions, like the “assign letter” command, but it is useless when your volumes are deleted but not missing – it can only apply to partition loss due to drive letter loss.

In fact, to perform volume recovery on an external hard drive safely and fast, you might as well rely on a professional and trusty partition recovery tool.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is the second to none choice – it can recover deleted partitions within 3 simple steps. With an easy user interface, all users can handle it.

As long as no data overwriting happens, all data in the deleted volumes will be kept intact.

Equipped with advanced scanning methods, it scans the hard disk for deleted volumes from HDD/SSD/USB/SD card, etc.

Moreover, as compatible software, it can perfectly work with Windows 11/10/8/7/Vista/XP OS, Windows 7 users can get missing partition in Windows 7 back easily.

Now, don’t hesitate to enjoy the amazing features of AOMEI Partition Assistant with a free trial.

Notes:✎...

“Full Search” scans your external hard drive thoroughly, and correspondingly, it costs more time than “Fast Search”, please wait patiently. 

When detected the deleted partition, File System, Capacity, Flag, etc. can be checked on the panel. 

If you are using Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012, and so on, you could upgrade it to Server Edition.

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

Step 2. Choose a search mode. “Fast Search” is recommended for the first time.

Step 3. Select the deleted partition you need to recover> “Proceed”.

Then wait for the software to process, and you will recover lost partition on external hard drive successfully.

Bonus tips: prevent future loss

After going through the feasible means to recover deleted volume on external hard drive, is there anything else we can do? Of course.

Deletion is inevitable to some degree because to err is human. But we can take some precautions to prevent things from getting worse – back up your partitions or data in case one day you may delete them carelessly.

To save your time and labor, turning to excellent backup software for Windows is a sagacious choice. AOMEI Backupper, a trusty freeware, can be a good helper in keeping your data safe.

Moreover, if you are searching for an approach to retrieve data from external hard disks, you might as well try MyRecover - a good Windows data recovery tool.