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Accidental starting process of to create Survival Kit has left external drive unusable

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Is it possible to correct a disk corruption problem due to accidental launching and then stopping the Recovery Kit option on Acronis True image backup. 

I went to make my periodic Acronis backup which I have done for years. Not paying attention this time, I unwittingly allowed the program to launch creating an Acronis Survival Kit.  I quickly realized what I had done, and tried to cancel the operation, but it wouldn't quit.  I also didn't see the disk anymore. Next I shut down the machine, but windows said that Acronis was in the way; however it allowed me to close Acronis. Then I shut down the PC and started up the computer again.  However when I clicked on the drive that I thought the external drive was on it said the disk was corrupted. Now when I click on the drive, it says location not available, disk not accessible, the parameter is not correct.  Acronis True Image also does not recognize the drive.

A had a lot of information on that disk.  Have I lost all the information? Can the disk be used again?

Any recommendations would be very much appreciated.

 

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Things have definitely gone pear-shaped! The process of creating the recovery partition was (I suspect) interrupted, causing damage to the disk. This is (probably) not fatal. All you need is the correct tools to repair the disk. 

Until you have worked out how best to proceed do not attempt to do anything to the disk. I would seriously consider doing a sector-by-sector backup before you try to recover the disk.

In the past I have used software to fix such issues, but it is not something I have done recently. I urge you not to do anything until the other MVP's have had a chance to respond.

Edit: Please provide specification of the backup drive.

Ian

Ian

The backup drive is a WD Elements 1 TB Hard Drive which I purchased I think about 7 years ago.

On the box of the drive, it says Compatibility Formatted NTFS for Windows 8 or higher, ... operating system.

I am running windows 10. 

I haven't done anything further with the disk, and as you have advised I will not do anything with the disk until further notice.

Thanks 

Mark  

Mark, one of the actions that the Survival Kit process has to do is to resize the main NTFS partition on your WD 1TB HDD in order to make space to create a new 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive where the Acronis boot media will be stored.

By interrupting that process you will probably need to try using a partition recovery program to see if the partition can be corrected or not?

Try doing a search in Google (or your favourite search engine) for 'Partition recovery software' to see what tools are available.

The MiniTool Partition Wizard tool includes a Partition Recovery tool but it requires that a license to one of their professional licenses be held to use it, but there may be other free tools?

Example: The 10 Best Free Partition Recovery Software 2022

 Thanks for your help.  Using the disk management feature in Windows, I can see the drive. The file system is labeled RAW and the disk is 100% free.  Looking at some file recovery programs on Youtube, it seems that they are smart enough to allow you to copy data from the problem disk to another disk, let's call it drive X.

After one does copying using the recovery program, I guess the next step would be to format the problem disk to NTFS and then copy the data back to it from disk X.   

I wonder, If I had let the Acronis Survival Kit run to successful completion in the first place, would the files on the disk been available. 

A big round of applause to Ian and Steve. You all are very committed to Forum members and always go the extra mile.

Much appreciated. 

Mark

Mark, if you had let the SK process run to completion then yes, it should have left all your files intact on the main NTFS partition of the drive and just reduced the drive space by 2GB to create the new SK 2GB FAT32 boot partition.

Some disk / partition recovery tools that I have used in the past worked their magic by recovering the data for the drive without needing to use another drive to copy them to but this will be down to whatever tool you decide to use.

Ian and Steve

Thanks for your help on this and in responding to all of my questions and sorry for not marking it solved earlier. 

I tried some the free partition recovery software.  One ran for 2 1/2 hours( yes there was a lot on the disk) and would have allowed me to recapture everything on the disk on a file by file basis. However, I could not see the names of the individual files.  I was satisfied, however, that there was a strong likelihood that what was in the disk I had duplicated elsewhere.