Accidentally turned my 5TB external HDD into a Windows 11 installer. DMDE found my original NTFS partition - how do I restore it?
Hi everyone,
I accidentally used Microsoft's Windows 11 Media Creation Tool on my 5TB WD external HDD, which turned it into a Windows installer.
After that, Windows only showed a 32GB ESD-USB partition.
In Disk Management it showed:
- 32GB ESD-USB (FAT32)
- ~2TB unallocated
- ~2.6TB unallocated
I scanned the drive with DMDE 4.4.4 (Free Edition).
Good news: DMDE found a 5.00TB NTFS partition (Volume 02) and I can browse all of my original files (pictures, videos, games, documents, etc.). Everything appears to be intact.
The problem is that I don't know how to restore the partition table so Windows recognizes the drive normally again.
I do NOT want to copy 5TB of data to another drive if I can avoid it. I'd like to restore the original partition so the drive works exactly as before.
I accidentally clicked the Restore button once, but it only asked:
>
I clicked No because I don't think that's the correct operation.
My questions are:
- Since DMDE can browse all of my files, is restoring the GPT partition table the correct next step?
- In DMDE 4.4.4 Free Edition, what is the correct way to restore the partition entry?
- Is there any risk of data loss if I restore the partition instead of copying everything off first?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I can upload screenshots of the DMDE partition screen if needed.