A partition is a few hundred bytes of bookkeeping saying where a volume starts and how far it runs. Lose that and a disk holding years of work turns into one unallocated block with every file still on it. Partition recovery is the business of working out the original layout, and doing it against a copy so your disk is never the experiment.
One drive, one figure: £300 + VAT. Free diagnostic finished 2 working days after arrival, the structure rebuilt on an image, and logical partition work under no fix, no fee.
Nothing about your files changes when a partition goes. What changes is the paperwork at the front of the disk, and these are the events that damage it.
The installer was pointed at the wrong disk, or the custom option was skipped, and it laid down a fresh table with new system partitions at the front. The old volume is no longer listed, but the bulk of it lies well beyond anything the installer actually wrote to.
Shrinking one partition to grow another moves real data from one part of the disk to another and can take hours over it. A power cut, a flat laptop battery or an impatient reboot in the middle leaves a set of records describing a layout that is only half true.
Disk Management reports the full size of the drive and nothing whatever on it. The table has been zeroed, or it is failing its own checks. Nine times in ten the volumes are intact further in, and their opening sectors can be found by searching an image for them.
GPT keeps a header and its entry table at the start of the disk and a full duplicate at the very end, with checksums on both. If the primary copy fails its checksum, Windows may treat the disk as empty rather than reach for the backup. That backup is usually sitting there in perfect order.
Windows offers that dialogue whenever it meets a disk it cannot read, and it is the partition-table equivalent of the format prompt. Accepting writes a new empty table, and on a GPT disk it writes at both ends at once. An external drive that has always worked does not need initialising.
Utilities that scan for lost partitions and then offer to write the result back to the disk are the usual way a straightforward job becomes a hard one. If the guess is wrong, the true records are gone and the wrong ones are now official. A lab writes nothing at all to your disk.
Older disks use an MBR: sixty-four bytes at the end of the very first sector, four slots, each recording the type of a partition and where it starts and ends. It is a small and fragile arrangement, and one stray write at the front of a disk can empty it. GPT replaced it on anything modern. A GPT disk carries a protective entry in that first sector for the benefit of old software, then a header, then a table with room for well over a hundred entries, and it repeats the whole lot backwards from the last sector of the disk. Header and table both carry checksums, which is the useful part and occasionally the maddening part: a table that is only slightly damaged fails its own check and is treated as though it does not exist, even when the entries inside it are perfectly readable.
Because GPT duplicates itself at the far end, most partition losses on a modern disk are recoverable in the strict sense that the answer is already written down somewhere on the drive. The awkward cases are the ones where something wrote to both ends, which is exactly what initialising a disk in Disk Management does, and the ones where a USB enclosure reported a different sector size to the one the disk uses internally. Sector size matters more than people expect: a table written by a bridge board presenting 4,096-byte sectors will not be found by software hunting for 512-byte sectors, and a partition that appears to have vanished has occasionally only moved in the arithmetic.
The disk is imaged first, sector for sector, and every part of the reconstruction happens on that copy. A search runs across the whole image for the markers that begin a volume — NTFS and exFAT boot sectors, their backups at volume ends, ext and APFS structures, the recognisable start of a Linux swap area — and each hit is tested rather than trusted. A candidate is only accepted when the layout it implies holds together: the volume length agrees with the file table it points at, the directory tree can be walked, files open and are the size they claim to be. Several candidates usually turn up, some of them left over from layouts that have not existed for years, and telling the current one from a ghost is most of the skill in this work. None of it touches your disk, which sits in a drawer while the thinking happens.
The scanning stage of a partition tool is harmless enough. The commit stage is where it goes wrong, because writing a table to the original disk is a one-way action with no record of what was there before, and few of the tools make plain that a wrong answer is permanent. There is a second problem when the disk is physically unwell: a deep scan reads every sector of a drive that may be short of life, and drives have died halfway through one. If the disk is clicking, slow or dropping off the bus, stop and send it. If it is healthy and the data is not critical, image it to a file first and let the tool loose on the image instead.
Partition work is logical work. Where the disk is sound, the rebuild is covered by no fix, no fee. Where the drive turns out to be failing as well, that part is physical and takes 50% of the quoted price upfront, as the published rule sets out: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs.
Send the bare drive. If it is still bolted into a laptop or a tower it has to come out first, and that is not work done here — any repair shop in Liverpool will have it out in a few minutes. A portable USB drive can travel in its own shell. One disk of any size is £300 + VAT, whether it came from a MacBook, a desktop or an external case, and an NVMe blade costs the same. Two disks count as two jobs. Where the missing volume spanned an array, the work moves into the RAID recovery band, from £500 + VAT and rising with the number of members, and NAS recovery covers the boxes in the cupboard.
The lab is Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN — 35 miles from Liverpool and next working day by tracked post. There is no collection service anywhere in this network, so the parcel is yours to send: bubble wrap, a firm box, Special Delivery or a courier of your own choosing. The free diagnostic reports 2 working days after the drive arrives, with the layout it found and a fixed price to go with it. Straightforward partition recoveries run from 2-4 working days from approval. To talk it through beforehand, ring 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
They are rarely exotic. A four-terabyte external from a Baltic Triangle studio that went unallocated after an update, the second disk in a Speke workshop machine that disappeared the day an SSD was fitted alongside it, a laptop from the Wirral where the recovery partition was resized to make room and the whole arrangement came apart in the process. The pattern is the same in each: nothing wrong with the platters, everything wrong with the first sector. If the volume is present but unreadable that is RAW drive recovery instead, and deleted file recovery covers the case where the partition is fine and the folder is not.
Stop writing to the disk and post it tracked. The layout is worked out on a copy while your drive sits still.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
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Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.