How To Recover an Accidentally Deleted NTFS or FAT32 Dynamic Volume

If a Windows 2000 NTFS or FAT32 dynamic volume is accidentally deleted by using the Disk Management snap-in, you may be able to recover the volume and the data contained on it. You can do this only if a new volume has not been created and formatted in its place. When Disk Management removes a volume from a dynamic disk, it erases the volume's file-system boot sector (sector-0 of the volume), and then removes the volume entry from the Disk Management private region database, leaving the rest of the drive intact (including the data). Because both NTFS and FAT32 volumes maintain backup boot sectors, you can recover the volume by restoring the boot sector.

NOTES

• FAT16 volumes do not contain a backup boot sector and cannot be recovered if they are deleted.
• In this article, the steps to recover the deleted volume do not apply to a dynamic RAID-5 volume or to a dynamic mirrored volume.

To recover the deleted volume, use one of the following procedures.

To Recover a Deleted NTFS Volume

1. Re-create the exact same volume but choose not to format it. This may be difficult if you do not remember the exact size you had created originally, especially because the Disk Management snap-in tends to round partition sizes.
2. Using Dskprobe.exe, recover the backup boot sector for the NTFS volume from the end of the volume. Because it is a dynamic volume you may need to use Dmdiag.exe to help find the backup boot sector, or search for it by using Dskprobe.exe (on the Tools menu, click Search Sectors).
3. After rewriting the NTFS boot sector, quit Dskprobe.
4. In Disk Management, click Rescan Disks on the Action menu. This should mount the volume for immediate use.

To Recover a Deleted FAT32 Volume

1. Re-create the exact same volume, but choose not to format it. This may be difficult if you do not remember the exact size you had created originally, especially because the Disk Management snap-in tends to round partition sizes.
2. Using Dskprobe.exe, recover the backup boot sector for the FAT32 volume from sector-6 of the logical volume and write it to sector-0 of the logical volume. The "Resolution" section in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base describes this procedure in detail:
   247575  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247575/EN-US/ ) Chkdsk Does Not Use Backup Boot Sector to Fix Corrupted FAT32 Boot Sector
3. After rewriting the FAT32 boot sector, quit Dskprobe.
4. In Disk Management, click Rescan Disks on the Action menu. This should mount the volume for immediate use.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: