Partition table is a table described by operating system that has complete information about all the logical partitions present in any storage drive. It usually lay in the first sector (MBR) of each hard drive, holding partition information like number of partitions on the drive, size and location of each partition, starting and ending pointer value and so on. Moreover, just like the internal hard disk on computer, even external hard drive will posses Partition Table holding details of partitions present in that drive.
When it comes to external hard drive, some users install different Windows OS on the external drive other than the one on their desktop / PC. So, that at any given time they can load this alternate Windows OS from external hard drive. But sometimes, starting a computer by trying to load OS from external hard drive might show error message like “Invalid Partition Table”. As this error pops up computer won’t start up and you will be wondering why this error even gets displayed.
This invalid Partition Table error can occur for number of reasons like:
- MBR corruption on external hard drive because of malware or incorrect OS installation
- If external hard drive has more than one partition marked as ‘Active partition’
- If external hard drive is not installed with any operating system and system keeps looking at the external hard drive as a boot device
In these situations, there are no chances of accessing any data from such external hard drive even if it is connected as formal removable storage drive unlike a bootable device. All you can do is, fetch a third party data recovery program and retrieve entire hard drive data before any disaster strikes.
External hard drive data recovery program:
Yodot Hard Drive Recovery is the best utility to bring back all data from external hard drives with corrupt partition table. This tool possibly retrieves each and every file like documents, program files, movies, pictures, reports, archives, folders, etc. from all partitions on external hard drive. This tool has ability to retrieve data from corrupted, dead, failed, bad, crashed and error showing partitions with NTFS, NTFS5, FAT32, FAT16, ExFAT and ReFS file systems. In addition, it can regain data from primary partition, active partition, extended partition, GPT partition, GUID partition and many more on both external as well as internal hard disk drives. One can use this software to retrieve data even from SSD, USB pen drive, FireWire drive, flash memory card and other storage devices. This program can be installed and run on Windows PCs and laptops with Windows 8.x, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008 and 2003 operating systems.
Procedural steps to get data from portable hard drive partition table:
- Connect victim external hard drive to a healthy Windows computer and download the utility on it
- As installation completes, run the software
- In main screen, choose “Partition Recovery” option to get data from external hard drive partitions
- In next screen all drives associated with the host computer will be displayed
- Choose the one that represents external hard drive from which partition data has to be recovered
- Next pick required file types that has to be rescued from removable drive or skip this step
- Trigger scanning process by clicking next and view its progress in Status bar
- Glance at retrieved data in two distinct view modes - Data View and File Type View
- After previewing required files, select desirable destination location to save these files and click on ‘Save’ option
Important Note:
- In case of troubles while using software always contact technical support team available 24 /7
- Backup potential data from external hard drive on to secure location to avoid any kind of data loss
