I have a TB external HDD divided in 2 partition:
First partition: 280 GB
Second partition: 1720 GB
Initially, both partitions were NTFS.
Then, I formatted the first partition to macOS Extended FS, and then to FAT32,
and the second partition vanished. I can't see it in Disk Utilities nor in Paragon NTFS 15.
I tried to revert first partition to NTFS, but the second one is still not showing… What should I do?
here is the result of diskutil list
~ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *250.1 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 249.8 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +249.8 GB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 119.9 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 20.5 MB disk1s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 503.9 MB disk1s3
4: APFS Volume VM 5.4 GB disk1s4
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: Windows_NTFS HDD1 228.4 GB disk2s1
Here is the result of sudo fdisk /dev/disk2
~ sudo fdisk /dev/disk2
Disk: /dev/disk2 geometry: 243201/255/63 [3907029167 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*1: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 206848 - 446126158] HPFS/QNX/AUX
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
EDIT:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 bs=512 skip=446333006 count=150000000 | grep -o -a -b "BOOTMGR"
71010552671:BOOTMGR
71010552692:BOOTMGR
150000000+0 records in
150000000+0 records out
76800000000 bytes transferred in 11355.441546 secs (6763277 bytes/sec)
Best Answer
There is only one partition on your external drive. I suspect that instead of erasing the first partition, you erased the entire drive. But if this were true, then the new partition would span the entire drive. So at this point, it would be best to try and find the missing partition.
The correct function to find the header of a missing NTFS partitions is given below. To use this function, you will need to first copy this function and then paste as a command in a Terminal application window.
Below is a example of its use. I have a 4 GB NTFS formatted flash drive. The output from
sudo fdisk /dev/disk1
is given below.Since the flash drive contains
7811072
sectors and the sector size is512
bytes, the drive size is exactly3999268864
bytes, which is the product of the two numbers. If wanted to search the entire flash drive for a NTFS partition, I would need to search from 0 MB to 3999 MB of data. An example of usingfindntfs
to do this is shown below.The important information to extract from this output are the hexadecimal values
003f0000
andee5ffe00
. These values are the offset in bytes for the first and last sectors of the NTFS partition.Below is the compute value of the byte location of the first sector based on the value shown from the output of
fdisk
.Below is the compute value of the byte location of the last sector based on the value shown from the output of
fdisk
.Both of these values match the output from
findntfs
.In your case, I would suggest looking for the beginning of your missing partition somewhere around 270 GB to 290 GB. For this, the command would be as shown below.
Of course, this may take a while. If you feel lucky, you can try narrowing your search.
I would suggest looking for the ending of your missing partition somewhere around 1980398 GB to 2000398 GB. For this, the command would be as shown below.
The function below looks into the found sector and prints out the number of sectors occupied by the candidate NTFS partition. The input is the offset of the partition in bytes and the drive name.
Below is an example where this function is used.
The output from both functions is the same as from
fdisk
.