Many factors are proved to be very harmful to the partition and data.

But the root cause isthepartition tableis in trouble (it may be deleted or damaged).

But, you dont need to get into an endless panic right away after discovering partition loss/damage problem.

data recovery software

Two: trigger the software and specify the disk from which the partition is lost or damaged.

External hard drive not showing up or recognized in computers is a common problem.

This article puts forward several ways to fix it.

select This PC to choose a damaged partition

Three: hit the Scan button to detect files or double hit the target partition/disk to scan.

Four: keep an eye on the files that have been found by the software.

Wait till all the data you need are scanned out.

Fix: External Hard Drive Not Showing Up Or Recognized

Five: check all the items you need and hit the Save button.

Specify a safe location from the pop-up interface and hit OK to confirm.

What if the disk shows as unknown (RAW, unallocated, not initialized, or offline)?

keep an eye on the found files

Plentiful error messages may appear:

Now, Im going to talk about3 of the most common symptoms.

4 Common Causes of Partition Table Failure

1.

So partitions will be lost on disk after conversion.

disk management tool

Sudden change offile systemenvironment.

The virus should be regarded as the most threatening factor to cause partition table failure.

Many kinds of viruses are designed to attack the partition table of disks to remove users partitions and data.

check all the partitions to recover

Of course, therere many other factors that could lead to partition table loss/damage apart from above-mentioned ones.

At this time, how can they fix the corrupted partition table?

Here, Ill introduce somecommonly used methodsin brief.

Missing operating system, operating system not found

Generally, the computer will be brought back to normal after residual viruses were cleared.

As a famous command-line utility,fdiskhas a very convenient master boot sector recovery function.

Fix with recovery software.

convert a disk from GPT to MBR

On the contrary, if theres nothing found in the partition table, the access will be denied.

This explains clearly whydeleted files can be recovered.

Partition table occupies the 447 to 510 byte of a certain sector, having a total of 64 bytes.

deletion tag

If they are, it indicates that the previous part is the partition table.

On the contrary, it is not.

2 Main Types of Partition Table

Two popular partition schemes areMBR and GPT.

MBR & GPT

The concept of MBR firstly appeared in 1983 when PC DOS 2.0 started to support hard disk.

So it is the most compatible partition scheme.

Now, Ill explain these two kinds of partition tables to you.

Look, heres the conclusion MBR disk doesnt support more than 4 primary partitions.

This also shows us why the extended partition andlogical partitionconcept is introduced afterward.

Compared to the MBR partition scheme, the GPT partition scheme has many advantages.

Click to see the differences between GPT and MBR.

Thus, the first thing you should do after that is starting partition table recovery ASAP.

After that, you may try your best to analyze the phenomena and figure out the causes.

like remember, backup is always the safest way to achieve high data security in any situations.

Partition Table Recovery FAQ