Hard drive repartitioning is a common task that you need to perform either for better management of your data or to install an additional operating system on your Windows computer. If you have an unpartitioned hard drive, it becomes essential to create a new partition to install another operating system or make your system dual-boot. You can do it using Fdisk tool or Disk Administrator in Microsoft Windows. In some cases, hard drive repartitioning corrupts partition table and lead to serious partition loss situations. At this point, you need to opt for Windows Partition Recovery to retrieve lost partition and stored data.

Microsoft Windows Disk Administrator (and Fdisk engine that it shares with the Setup) writes Windows partition table information to hard drive based on the Cylinder-Head-Sector geometry of the hard drive. For SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) hard drives, this geometry is devised by drive, instead of being inherent property of hard drive. MS Windows follows a comparatively standard method for using geometry, which produces 1 MB tracks. However, SCSI hard drive that run with BIOS (Basic Input Output Systems) or other systems could use varying geometries.

Cause of the problem

When the hard drive with multiple volumes is taken from one computer to another, which uses different geometry, repartitioning the hard drive with Disk Administrator may cause Windows partition table to become damaged. This issue takes place because Windows Disk Administrator adjusts all the partitions on the track boundaries based upon current hard drive geometry. If partition table entries for existing partitions are rewritten with new starting offsets, data stored on those partitions becomes inaccessible.

Resolution

You can correct or avoid this issue by editing partition table to set partition length and start sector back to original value. You can determine disk geometry by using BPB (BIOS Parameter Block) in sector one of physical volume. You can also use sector zero of disk partitions that also has a BPB for finding starting sector offset.

If above method does not work, you need to format the hard drive and recreate partition table by reinstalling the operating system. Though, this method fixes all such issues, but also removes the hard drive partitions and need Partition Recovery to be handled.

You can perform quick and easy Windows Partition Recovery through third-party applications, known as Partition Recovery Software. The applications are pretty safe and easy to use with read-only conduct and rich graphical user interface.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most excellent solution to recover lost hard drive partitions. It works well with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000. The software recovers FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, and NTFS5 file system partitions.