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Partition Recovery
There are 3 main ways that you can run into an issue whereby you need to recover your partitions:
Partition Recovery
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- Your partition(s) have become corrupted.
- You have reformatted your drive.
- You have deleted your partition table, or your partition table has become corrupted.
So lets start with defining what a partition is. According to Wikipedia, “Disk partitioning is the act of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. Partitions are also termed “slices” for operating systems based on BSD and Solaris“
Generally speaking, when a partition is deleted from a hard drive, the only thing that happens is that the parition’s entry in the partition table within the master boot record. Although this entry is removed, all of the data itself still remains intact on the hard drive until such time as it is overwritten.
It is thus possible to use a variety of recovery tools/software such as gpart and testdisk to find lost file systems and then rebuild the partition table including entries for the lost partition (partition recovery)
It is important to note that the master boot record (which contains the parition table) is stored on the first sector of a hard drive, and is commonly referred to as ‘Sector 0′. Should this sector be overwritten or erased by any operation, recovery is a little more complicated, but in effect the same principle is used. A new master boot record (MBR) is created and if any lost file systems (partitions) are found on the disk they are written into a new parition table.
Recovering your lost partition should not be impossible, but by far the best thing to do is to immediately use a partition recovery tool so that the potential loss of data is minimized.