Lost and Deleted Partition Recovery

When a drive partition disappears or displays as unallocated space in Disk Management or Disk Utility, the operating system has simply lost the partition table or file system header. The actual file data remains intact across the disk sectors until newly written data replaces it.

The most important rule in partition recovery is to stop using the drive immediately. Do not format the disk, initialize a new partition, or run automated disk repair utilities. Any new write activity risks permanently overwriting the unallocated sectors where your lost files reside.

RecoverHelper offers specialized scan engines tailored to the condition of your missing volume:

• Deep Scan (Default): The recommended choice for lost or deleted partitions. Deep Scan first performs a Quick Scan to find surviving NTFS Master File Table (MFT) records, then automatically carves the entire physical disk by file signature to recover data even when directory trees are gone.
• Carving Only: Pure signature-based carving designed for raw partitions, non-NTFS volumes (such as FAT32 and exFAT), and unpartitioned disks where file system headers are completely missing. This mode reconstructs file content directly from sector signatures.
• Quick Scan: Parses intact NTFS file system metadata to restore original file names, directory structures, and timestamps when partition boundaries are still accessible.

Follow these steps to safely recover files from a deleted or inaccessible partition:

1. Connect the storage device to your Windows PC or Mac and launch RecoverHelper.
2. Select the physical disk containing the lost or unallocated partition.
3. Run Deep Scan (or Carving Only for raw or non-NTFS drives) to scan sectors read-only.
4. Review live progress, throughput, and estimated completion time while browsing detected files.
5. Preview your photos, videos, and documents to confirm file integrity.
6. Select your files and save them to a different physical drive.

Recovering data from a damaged or missing partition requires strict safety measures to prevent data loss:

• Strict Read-Only Scanning: RecoverHelper opens and inspects the source drive in strictly read-only mode, guaranteeing that the scan never modifies or degrades the underlying storage.
• Same-Drive Output Blocked: To eliminate the danger of overwriting missing partition data, RecoverHelper automatically blocks saving recovered files to the same physical drive. Always select a separate external hard drive, SSD, or USB drive as your destination.
• Bad-Sector Tolerance: If the partition vanished due to hardware instability, the engine skips unreadable sectors and continues scanning to salvage all accessible files.

RecoverHelper includes a live preview tool so you can inspect photos, videos, and documents during the scan to verify their integrity before recovery.

Free for JPG & PNG right away; pair the free mobile app once to unlock every other format — also free. Nothing to buy.

You can recover full-resolution JPG and PNG photos instantly with no account required. Pairing the free companion mobile app via a one-time QR code unlock grants full access to camera RAW files (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RAF, PEF, TIFF), HEIC images, video files (MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WebM), audio tracks (MP3, WAV, FLAC), documents (PDF, DOCX, XLSX), and archives (ZIP, RAR, 7Z) at zero cost.