Instances like losing files from your Mac, due to any reason, can put you in trouble. This situation, unfortunately, occurs with anyone at any time. Moreover, losing an entire partition is an inconvenience and can be a critical situation.
When any partition from your Mac device gets deleted, you will be unable to access everything stored on it. In such cases, you need to apply proper methods to recover lost partitions on a Mac device.
Here, in this post, we will discuss everything that you must know to recover deleted or lost partitions on a Mac.
What Causes Deletion of Partitions on Your Mac?
Before you know the methods to recover lost partitions from Mac, it is also important to know the exact cause of such issues. Many conditions lead to the loss of partition from Mac devices. Some of these are unavoidable while few of them can easily avoid.
Let’s check some common reasons why a partition could have been deleted or lost:
- Manual Errors: if you have made any mistake during hard drive partitioning time, this issue will occur. The process to partition the Mac drive is quite critical and any mistake while doing so can easily wipe an entire partition. To avoid such a situation, it is important to check everything very carefully before taking any action.
- Hardware Issues: Sometimes, hardware-related issues can be the main culprit for the loss of partition on your device. Problems like fatal hard drive errors and file system corruption can corrupt your disk drive. In most cases, it has been noticed that hardware failures are unavoidable and can occur at random.
- Sudden Power Loss: Your Mac device constantly runs many programs in the background. If your system shuts down during an important event like an OS update, BIOS upgrade, or partition resize, it may cause several issues, including partition loss.
- Virus or Malware Attacks: Any sort of virus or malware attack on your Mac device can corrupt your data and can cause severe issues, like loss of the partitions from it.
How Do I Recover a Deleted or Lost Partition on a Mac?
Fortunately, several recovery methods and Mac data recovery software are available to deal with this issue. In this section, we will describe some common methods to recover lost partitions on a Mac.
Method 01: Restore Deleted Partition on Mac Using Disk Utility
Mac’s in-built Disk Utility tool allows you to restore everything that was deleted from the partitions of your device. Along with partition recovery, it also helps you with various other tasks, like adding new partitions, formatting them, deletion of partitions, etc. Go through the following steps to know how to recover a lost disk using Disk Utility:
- First, launch Disk Utility on your Mac device using Finder. For this, go to Finder > Application > Utilities > Disk Utility.
- Now, click on View from the menu located at the top and then select “Show All Devices”.
- Choose the Volume that you need to restore, and click the Restore button.
- Go through the on-screen instructions from the Restore pop-up menu to complete the recovery process.
Method 02: Recover Lost Partition from TestDisk
If the Disk Utility tool fails to recover your lost or deleted partitions, you can use TestDisk, i.e., a free, open-source, and cross-platform application. TestDisk recovery tool allows you to get back the deleted data, and lost partition, and fix the bootable disk.
However, this tool has no graphical interface, as it is not as beginner-friendly as Stellar Data Recovery Professional.
To use this partition recovery tool, you need to install TestDisk on your Mac.
For this, you need to install Homebrew on your Mac.
Homebrew is an open-source software package management system that allows you to install software on your Mac device.
Now, check out the following steps to recover a lost or deleted Mac partition using TestDisk:
- Launch Terminal and paste the following command: /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”
- Press the Return key and provide your username and password in the respective fields, when asked. Again, press the Return key to complete the installation process. Now, when you get the message, indicating the tool gets successfully installed, paste the following command to install TestDisk: brew install testdisk.
- Now, type the following command: sudo testdisk in Terminal to launch TeskDisk.
- After that, you need to check whether you need to create a new log file or not. Also, choose the drive that you need to scan along with the partition table type.
- Then, choose the Analyze function and search for any lost partitions. Lastly, you need to begin the Quick Search process.
- Once the scanning process will complete, you will get the list of recoverable partitions on your screen. Select the partition you need to recover and click the Return button. Then choose the Write option to save the partition structure.
In case, if the tool has not detected any lost partition, you can try doing a Deeper Search option. The Deeper scan option might help you to recover the partition you want.
Method 03: Recover Partition on Mac Using Data Recovery Software
Many users found that the above methods to recover lost partitions on Mac sometimes became failures. In such cases, you can use professional data recovery software.
One of the best recovery software that you can try is the Stellar Data Recovery Professional tool. This Mac data recovery software is very well popular for its amazing user interface that helps you in completing the recovery process in a few simple clicks.
The Stellar Data Recovery Professional software comes in multiple versions that actually vary in features. This recovery tool helps you to restore deleted data even from formatted, encrypted, or corrupted drives.
Given below are the simple steps that you should follow to recover lost partitions on Mac, using this tool:
- Download and install the Stellar Data Recovery Professional software on your computer. Launch the software and select the file types that you need to recover. Click the Next button to continue.
- Now, from the “Recover From” window, select Can’t Find Volume and click Next.
- Tap on the Lost Volume (always indicated with a red flag), and select the Deep Scan option located in the bottom left corner. Click the Scan button to begin the scanning process.
- Once the scanning process will complete, locate and select the files that you need to restore.
- At last, click the Recover button to save the recovered data.
Tips to Avoid Loss of Partition on Mac Devices
However, it is easy to recover lost partitions on Mac devices, but it is important to be familiar with the preventive measures to avoid such issues. Here are some ways to avoid issues like loss or deletion of partitions on your device:
- It is important to avoid using your device immediately when you encounter data loss on it. Your disk will start to fail at any point, so it is important to check the drive status on regular basis.
- Always make backups of important data by using cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox. These services allow you to access your data from anywhere with a data connection.
- As mentioned, malware & virus, attacks are also responsible for the deletion of partitions from Mac devices. As a Mac user, it is important for you to protect your device using an antivirus application.
- Make sure you are using reliable partition recovery software as an ineffective tool can cause more damage to your drive.
Wrapping Up
The above-mentioned methods will help you to recover deleted partitions on your Mac devices. In case the manual methods to recover lost partitions on a Mac become a failure, you can use professional data recovery software programs, available online.
Tools like Stellar Data Recovery Professional will help you to recover deleted partitions in no time.
Hope this article helped you!
