Lost Partition Recovery: Recover lost partitions in Windows 11/10/8/7

Is there any way I can recover the lost partition?

Partition loss is one of the most commonly occurring problems in the operating system. It’s very unpleasant when you can’t find the partition and files where you expect them to be.

Lost partition recovery is different from restoring deleted or lost files. Compared with single files, the former should look for a whole partition. If you want to recover both lost files and partitions, please pay attention to the following tips:

Notes:✎...

Do not make any new operation to the hard drive and the partition.

Do not reformat the hard drive.

Do not rebuild the partition table.

How does a partition become "lost"?

To prevent partition loss from happening again in the future, you’d better know the reasons why a partition becomes lost. There are a few factors that cause partition loss or deletion.

Disk management errors. When operating disk management, it’s easy to delete partitions by mistake. You may delete a partition or damaged the partition table when making some wrong operations in disk cleaning or resizing a partition.

Unexpected system shutdown. Frequently system shutdown unexpectedly could cause computer faults, even hard drive errors. In this case, the partition can get lost.

Data corruption. If your operating system or file system becomes corrupted, then the hard drive cannot run correctly, which may make partitions inaccessible.

Virus Infection. Virus and malware become increasingly complex and quite difficult to be detected and eliminated. Once the hard drive gets virus-infected, partitions can be deleted easily.

Bad Tracks/Sectors. If there are many bad sectors on a partition, the partition can be inaccessible and unable to be recognized by the operating system.

Run CHKDSK after Disk Defragmentation. The hard drive structure will get corrupt running CHKDSK when disk defragmentation finishes, and then, the partition gets lost.

Fortunately, you can recover the lost partition if you act as soon as possible after the deletion or loss. AOMEI Partition Assistant can make things easier with a concise interface and simple operations for anyone.

What is lost partition recovery?

Normally, the partition is recognized by your computer via its partition table and boot sector. When a partition is deleted, the operating system deletes its information like partition type, size, and file system, from the partition table but keeps sectors taken by the volume. You just only can’t see the deleted or lost partition in Disk Management and Windows File Explorer.

Therefore, if you accidentally deleted or lost a partition, there is still an opportunity to restore the lost partition if the section isn’t covered or rewritten by new data with the help of professional partition recovery software. Or you can recover lost partitions via CMD to assign a drive letter to the lost partition. 

Four steps to enable lost partition recovery

AOMEI Partition Assistant, as a professional disk management program, provides Partition Recovery Wizard to help users restore lost or deleted partitions. You can easily run lost partition recovery with it. Besides, there are many awesome features to make disk management easy to operate with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

❤❤❤AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional:

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a versatile partition manager, with which you can easily make disk management. It not only has the basic functions like “create partitions, delete partitions, format partitions, change drive letter, shrink partition, extend partition”, but includes many advanced features such as “convert MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, move partition, clone partition, merge partition, format large hard drive (over 32GB) to FAT32, allocate free space from one partition to another, clone hard disk”.

To recover lost partitions in Windows 10 via AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can download the demo version first and then follow the steps detailed below.

Step 1: Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant. 

Step 2: Select Partition Recovery Wizard on the left panel, and then click the disk you want to recover. Click “Next”.

Step 3: Select a search method. There are two kinds of search methods. It’s recommended that you select Fast Search the first time because it’s faster than Full Search.

Step 4: Select the lost partition, and click “Proceed”. Then you can see the congratulations message when finished.

Then you can go to Windows File Explorer to check whether the partition is recovered. If you did not make any new operations on the lost or deleted partition, the data stored in it will also be back and accessible too. If you want to recover some deleted files from partitions, you could use available backup files or professional data recovery software-MyRecover to recover files in Windows 11/10/8/7 and Windows Server.

Further reading: recover a lost partition using CMD

There is another method to recover a lost partition. If your problem was caused by the loss of volume label, drive letter or partition name, you can try the following steps to assign a drive letter to the lost partition and make it visible in Windows Files Explorer via CMD.

Step 1: Find the lost partition in Disk Management. Press “Win + R” and type “diskmgmt.msc” in the Run window, and then press OK to open Disk Management. The lost or deleted partition will be marked as Unallocated. Do remember the partition size.

Step 2: Type "CMD" in the search bar to open and run CMD as administrator.

Step 3: Type “diskpart” in the window and press Enter.

Step 4: Type “list disk” and press Enter. After that, all disks on the computer will be listed.

Step 5: Type “select disk *” and press Enter (Replace * with the number of the hard drive that contains the lost partition).

Step 6: Type “list volume” and press Enter.

Step 7: Type “select volume *” and press Enter (replace * with the number of the lost partition).

Step 8: Type “assign letter=*” and press Enter (Replace # with an available drive letter “C, D, E…Z”).

Conclusion

In most cases, you can recover the lost partition in Windows 10 via AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard. After you followed the steps above, you can’t still recover the lost partition, and then you need to check for bad sectors via the Check Partition function of AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Fully understanding the partition loss reasons can avoid recurrence of it in the future. Though professional partition recovery software can help you enable lost partition recovery, it’s recommended that you make a full backup image for your partitions to restore data and partitions easily once the operating system or file system gets corrupted.