How to recover a volume deleted in Disk Management

Step by step

1. Close Disk Management without touching the space

   The black bar marked Unallocated is where your volume was. Right-clicking it invites you to create a new volume, and the wizard formats it by default. A quick format writes a fresh file system right on top of the old one's most important records, so close the window instead.

2. Note what the volume looked like

   Write down which disk it was on (Disk 0, Disk 1 and so on), its approximate size, its letter and whether it was NTFS, exFAT or FAT32. These details help you pick the right candidate later, especially on a disk that has been repartitioned before.

3. Run FileFix Ultimate from another drive

   Use the portable ZIP on a USB stick or a different internal drive, and run it as administrator so it can read whole physical disks. Nothing has to be installed on the affected disk.

4. Select the physical disk, not a letter

   In Deleted file recovery, pick the entire physical disk that held the deleted volume. The deleted volume no longer has a letter, so it cannot be chosen any other way. The app reads the MBR or GPT and searches the disk for partitions that are no longer listed.

5. Choose the candidate that matches your notes

   Each candidate shows a start position, size and file system. A candidate whose size matches what you wrote down, and on NTFS whose backup boot sector agrees, is the one to scan. Run the Balanced scan on it to recover names and folders.

6. Save to a different physical disk

   Recover the folders you need to another disk, such as an external drive. Only when everything is safe should you decide whether to recreate the partition or start the disk fresh.

What Delete Volume actually removes

A disk keeps a small table at its start, MBR on older disks and GPT on most newer ones, that lists each partition's first sector and length. Delete Volume clears one row of that table. The NTFS or exFAT file system that lived inside the partition, with its folder records and file contents, is left where it was. Windows simply stops looking there.

That is why a deleted volume is usually one of the more recoverable accidents. On NTFS the volume also keeps a backup copy of its boot sector in its last sector, which lets a search confirm where the partition began and ended even when the first sector has been changed.

The mistakes that turn a simple fix into a hard one

The most common one is creating a new volume straight away to see whether the files come back. They do not, because the wizard formats the new volume, and the new file system's records land on top of the old ones. Copying files to that new volume then overwrites content as well.

The second is converting the disk between MBR and GPT or initialising it again, which writes a new partition table and can confuse later searches. The third is trying several partition tools one after another, each writing its own guess to the disk. Copying the files off first with a read-only tool avoids all three.

Hard drive, SSD or USB stick

On a hard drive, a memory card or most USB sticks, deleting a volume changes only the partition table, so the chances are good if nothing was written afterwards. On an internal SSD, Windows may send TRIM for the freed range when the volume is deleted. If that happened, the SSD can erase those blocks internally and the scan will find little or only zeros. It is still worth a scan, because TRIM does not always run, but keep expectations realistic.

When it won't work

• A new volume was created and formatted in the same space and many files were copied onto it.
• The deleted volume was on an SSD and TRIM erased the freed blocks.
• The space was reused by a Windows installation or a disk clone, which writes large amounts of new data.
• The volume was ReFS or BitLocker-encrypted without the recovery key; ReFS is not analysed, and encrypted data cannot be read without the key.

How FileFix Ultimate helps

• Reads the whole physical disk read-only and searches for partitions missing from the MBR or GPT, including through the NTFS backup boot sector.
• Shows each candidate's start, size and file system so you can match it with what you remember.
• Recovers original file names and folders from NTFS, exFAT and FAT32 records when they are intact, and falls back to signature search for the rest.
• Blocks saving to the volume being scanned and asks for confirmation before saving to another partition of the same disk.
• Free for personal use, with no recovery limit, no account and no upload.

Frequently asked questions