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I created a 32GB partition on my 1TB Western Digital External HDD.

The partition was created without a problem. Both the 32GB partition and the remaining partition were fully functional. I then used Windows 8's "Create a Recovery Drive" and pointed it towards the 32GB partition. It said it was going to delete the contents of the "drive," I clicked ok as it was pointing to the partition I had created for that purpose.

In the process, the larger partition dropped off and is now listed as unallocated space. I ran EaseUS Partition Master and it did not find the deleted partition and did it's complete search. It took just over 11 hours. When it was finished, the 32GB partition was listed twice, once as FAT and once as NTFS and then there were about 10 other partitons listed, of which about 4 were close to 1TB. My question is, which one do I chose?

Is this the best way to go about it? There was no overwriting or anything like that, the partition dropped off in a matter of seconds.

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  • I do not understand why you would put a 'recovery drive" on a External drive (specific to being external) My understanding of a recovery drive partition is a small partition you can boot to when something goes wrong, where you can access the system some and run fixing utilities. Would you be booting to this external drive when your system fails? A recovery drive partition is usually very small, it sounds logical that a former 32g space became mostly unallocated space. One more thing you could clear up, IF there is nothing on the drive , why didnt you just clear the partition table completely?
    – Psycogeek
    Aug 1, 2013 at 5:03
  • Possible ways: If this external is for backup, or user data, not system. You could make a CD for your recovery drive, and a Flash type recovery drive. Then you could clear this external up, and put 1or2 partitions on it, do simple basic partitions with simple basic formatting. Then your external will be simple in all ways, and you can boot to a recovery drive a few ways if ever needed. Less headaches.
    – Psycogeek
    Aug 1, 2013 at 6:29

1 Answer 1

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In Windows 8 when you choose to "Create a Recovery Drive", the wizard formats the whole drive and then sets it up to be a recovery drive/partiton for your Windows 8 machine. It is also recommend not to store any other data on this "Recovery Drive", this is just for recovering your machine and that is it.

You can use EaseUS to recover a partition, and you should be able to tell by the size of the partition and name which one you want to recover. However if you do recover the formatted partition you will break the recover drive.

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