The purpose of this useful utility is to enable advanced storage tasks that are not possible to perform from File Explorer, which only lists partitions that are in good working order. To determine if you can recover a lost partition on Windows 10, you must first find out what really happened to it, and the Disk Management utility can help you do just that. When a partition doesn’t have any file system, it appears as RAW and-just like an unpartitioned storage device-can’t be used to save files. HFS, HFS+, APFS, FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS (read-only)įAT32, Ext2/3/4, Btrfs, Reiser4, XFS, and others

This information is extremely important because different operating systems can access only partitions with certain file systems: Operating SystemįAT16/32, NTFS, NTFS 5, exFAT, Live File System, and ReFS Information about partitions is stored in the partition table, which is located in a special region on the storage device, known as the Master Boot Record (MBR) or the GUID Partition Table (GPT) or something similar.Īmong the information stored in the partition table is the file system of each partition on the storage device. Without at least one partition, Windows wouldn’t know where to save files, which would make the storage device next to useless. You can think of a partition as a container for data stored on a storage device, such as an internal hard drive or USB flash drive.

Here’s a textbook definition of partition: A section of the storage device that is separated from other segments.

Recover deleted partition linux