I was trying to create recovery media on a USB stick for my new laptop but for some reason it wasn't working. I kept trying it and eventually it worked. A while later I came to access my USB hard drive but it wasnt showing up in My Computer. I checked Disk Management and found my USB HDD had a 32gb RAW partition and a 2.7TB Unallocated Space partition.

So it looks like the recovery media application was trying to write to my USB HDD instead of my USB stick. It obviously didn't write anything to the HDD as the 32gb partition is a RAW format.

I have tried two pieces of partition recovery software but they only find loads of little partitions.

I haven't tried any file recovery software yet. I was hoping I could use partition recovery software.

Could anyone help me out?

Some 3TB external HDDs are configured with 4KB sector sizes. Your 32GB flash image was probably configured as 512 bytes/sector. I suspect that you now have a 512 bytes/sector file system on a 4096 bytes/sector physical drive. If so, then that is why it is being reported as RAW.

I would examine the partitions with a tool such as DMDE (freeware disc editor). Can you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

http://dmde.com/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I have been concentrating on the 2.7TB Unallocated Space partition rather than the 32GB RAW partition.


I ran DMDE and it shows this screen:

I have ran DMDE and this is what im getting:

The 32GB RAW partition does unfortunately seem to be full of zeros so any data that was on there is lost forever.
The 2.7TB Unallocated Space partition does have data on it. I need a way to get this off preserving the file structure it was in, if at all possible.

Thanks for the replies. Yes, I paid $80 for GetDataBack, which found all my files and folders.
I copied the folders i needed onto another hard drive, formatted the problem drive and then copied my files back.

Then I made a back up.