How to Recover Data/Partition After Power Outage

Power outage or power surge has the potential to cause data loss or partition loss on your computer. Depending on your specific situation, you will have different ways to retrieve your files or partition and make your computer disk work normally again.

Overview of Data/Partition Loss After Power Failure

"Partition disappears after a power failure, now shows 'Unallocated'."

Most of you have encountered power outage or power surge at one time or another. If you are working with your computer when such power issues happen, you may find your data or partition is lost or inaccessible after the accident. Generally, a power outage/surge may result in:

• Files are lost on your computer or external hard drive
• Disk Partition becomes unallocated
• Disk Partition becomes inaccessible: The partition still exists, but you cannot open or access the file on it

Luckily, the files or partition are recoverable with the proper tools. Specify your situation and find the corresponding fixes provided below to get back your lost content with ease.

How to Recover Data/Partition After Power Outage

Do not put new files to your hard drive on which the data is lost to avoid data overwriting. Instead, perform data/partition recovery as soon as possible.

Solution 1. Recover Lost Data

If you lost some of your files on your computer or external storage devices after the power outage, you can use the free data recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to retrieve your data. For a detailed guide, you can refer to the article about how to recover lost files in Windows.

Solution 2. Recover Lost Partition

If your partition disappears after the power failure and becomes unallocated space, you can recover your partition and files on it using the lost partition recovery software. It will help you recover partitions lost due to power failure, improper operation, corrupted partition table, bad sectors, repartition, and more.

To recover your partition after a power outage:

Notice: It supports NTFS/exFAT/FAT32/BitLocker recovery of lost partitions, such as partition deletion, uninitialized disk, and unallocated space, as well as recovery of partitions that become RAW.

Step 1. Search for Lost Partitions

First, choose "Lost Partition Rescue" on the left and click "Start" to initiate the partition scan. Your disk will be displayed, including existing and lost partitions (marked as unallocated). Then click "Search for Lost Partition" to begin the scan.

Step 2. Check Files in the Partition

Wait for the smart partition scanning. This process may take several minutes, depending on the severity of the partition loss. While waiting, you can move the cursor to the partition you want to  view the files and data in it.

Step 3. Select and Restore the Partition

Select the partitions you want to recover from the list of lost partitions that have been scanned. Their corresponding information will also be displayed below. After selecting, click "Recover" to restore your disk partition settings.

Solution 3. Restore Inaccessible Partition

Being different from partition loss, if your partition becomes inaccessible after the power failure or power surge, you will see it show up on your computer, but you cannot open it. Instead, you may see a prompt saying "you need to format the disk in drive before you can use it" after double-clicking the partition.

If you are in a situation in which Windows asks you to format your drive, don't format your partition at once. Formatting will erase all the existing files on your partition. Although formatted data recovery is possible in most of the cases, it's always more advisable to perform data recovery before the operation. When your partition becomes inaccessible and formatting is required, it's highly likely the file system of it has become RAW. You can recover data from a RAW drive successfully with EaseUS data recovery software.

Briefly speaking, the steps to restore an inaccessible partition are:

Step 1. Recover data from your RAW partition to somewhere else.

Step 2. Format the drive to make it usable.

Step 3. Copy the recovered files back to the partition.

The Bottom Line

In addition to direct file loss, you may lose the progress you are working on when a power outage occurs. That's when you need to recover unsaved files in Windows. Besides, if you have external storage devices connected, it may be corrupted after the power issue, be it external hard drive not detected or pen drive not showing data. We cannot prevent power failure, but we can grow a good habit of backing up our precious files regularly, which can reduce the chance of complete data loss.

Hope this guide can help you retrieve what you have lost.