Help! Router repartitioned my drive, can't see my data!

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I think I’ve lost about a TB worth of data. I’m rebulding a computer and had my hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB, in an external enclosure so that I could access files from it until I could move them to a new drive. I just happened to hook the drive up to the USB port on my new Linksys EA3500 router and now I can’t see anything. I believe the process of plugging the drive in, allowed the router to mess with the partition table of my drive. Before, when things worked I saw three logical drives. one of about 50-75 MB of reserved space. One of about 80 GB that was my original system drive and one of about 920 GB that was my main data drive. All of these were NTFS. Now when I look at the drive, all I see is one drive FAT32 drive of about 71 MB.

If I look at the drive under Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management, I see the drive is made up of a 71 MB FAT 32 Primary Partition and a 932 GB Unallocated partition.

Am I totally screwed? Is my data still there and is there any way for me to access it or any utilities I can use to get to my data in this unallocated partition?

Help! Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Much thanks in advance.

  • Byron Followell
2

if the disk management is saying 932 GB unallocated, it means that the partition of the drive is no longer visible… in this case, you can try with a data recovery software connecting the drive internally on a desktop computer to see if you can get your files back… then you will need to create a new partition on the drive so you can use that again.