Summary:
Physical hard drive can be divided into several partitions to manage your storage space. What if one of your partitions that hold your important data is damaged or corrupted? How would you repair the damaged partition and recover data from it? This free guide will let you know the simple methods to repair the damaged partition and recover data from the same.
What is a Damaged Partition?
A Partition is said to be damaged or corrupted when the data present on the partitions becomes inaccessible. Also, you will be unable to access the complete drive or partition that has your important data.
There are chances if the partition that holds the program files gets damaged, you will not be able to access your computer and encounter an error Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing
If your computer is functioning well, the good news is that your main partition that holds the operating system might not be the one damaged. Now, let us see what makes the partition inaccessible.
What Can Damage a Partition?
Below listed are the few of the common reasons that are responsible for partition damage.
Corrupt Partition Table: Partition table holds all the information related to the partition such as location, size, type etc. and is associated with MBR. MBR stores information of the logical partitions and file system organized on the drives.
If MBR or the partition table gets damaged or corrupted, that could lead to the accessibility of the partition.
Improper Partition Handling: Human errors are always one of the reasons for partition damage. Interrupting the transfer process on your hard drive or improper repartitioning of your hard drive could lead to partition damage and lead to the error partition is missing.
Virus Infection: Using an virus infected USB or downloading content from a non trusted site might bring down the virus to your computer. Many viruses can directly damage the boot sectors and partition table that interns make partition to disappear.
Irrespective of the causes, you can still fix the bad partition and restore your important data from the damaged partition.
How To Repair Damaged Partitions?
A partition is said to be damaged or corrupted when the Operating system fails to recognize partition. However, repairing a damaged partition is a simple process. Follow the below mentioned steps using command prompt to manually fix damaged partition:
Method 1: Fix Damaged Partition using CHKDSK
- Right Click on the Start Button (Windows 8) → Click on Command Prompt (Run as administrator)
- Type chkdsk F: /f /r /x [Where F refers to the drive that you want repair]
Once the process gets completed, verify whether files present in the partition are in the healthy condition and can be accessed.
If you still unable to access data on the drive, you can try formatting the drive. If there any damage in the file system, formatting the drive could fix the problem.
Important note: It is important to know that the the next method- Formatting the drive, involves erasing of data from the drive. Therefore, it is suggested to recover data from the drive and then try formatting the drive.
Method 2: Format the drive to fix Corruption
Once a partition is severely damaged and it can’t be fixed using CHKDSK, the best way to repair it is to format it back to its original state. Formatting is the process of erasing anything on that partition. As a result, you’re left with a clean slate to start again from.
- Right-click on the Start button and select Disk Management.
- Right-click on the partition you want to repair and select Format.
- Add a name for the new partition and make sure Perform a quick format is ticked. Press OK.
A final confirmation message will remind you to back up, recover any data that you need before formatting. Press OK.
Once the partition has been formatted, you can move your files back across and access the data.
If you are unable to access the data from the repaired partition, here is the most recommended tool to restore data from the damaged partition. SFWare Partition Recovery Tool is designed with an advanced algorithm that can reach out to all the inaccessible sectors on the hard drive to recover your lost data.
Be it NTFS, FAT or exFAT, SFWare identifies most of the file system and helps you recover every format of data that you have lost. To recover data from the damaged partition, click on the download button and try it for free now.
How to Recover Data from a Damaged Partition?
With just 4 simple steps you can recover data from the corrupt or damaged partition without any hassle. Download and install the SFWare Partition Recovery Tool. Launch the application on your computer.
Select the Drive/Partition Recovery from the main screen. Select the damaged volume and click on the next button to start the scanning process. After the completion of the scanning process, the recovered files will be displayed in both Data View and File Type View.
The tool will facilitate a preview of recovered data from the damaged partition. At last, if you are satisfied with the recovered data go ahead and save them on to desired location.
Tips to Avoid Partition Damage
You can avoid damage or corruption on the partition by following simple techniques-
- Make use of trusted anti virus tool to keep your computer drives free from virus and malwares
- Run CHKDSK regularly to fix the bad sectors on the partition
- To avoid file system damage or corruption ensure consistent power supply when partitioning the hard disk