Windows 10: Virtual hard drive made with partition wizard lost after win10 install

As per title, i have this annoying issue. Having a 3TB hard drive in win7, after partitioning normally the first 2GB of it, i opted to use partition wizard to partition the remaining 1GB of the drive. It did so, i assume, by creating a permanent virtual hard drive. After installing win10 insider preview it is gone.

Since insider win10 tells me rollback is impossible (for no reason), i tried using partition wizard to recover the lost virtual disk and its partition. While Partition Wizard DOES detect the missing partition easily (unlike all other partition tools i tried, which do not even detect the missing one), it cannot recover it, because it tries to write it as a normal partition on the inaccessible part of the 3TB MBR disk! (See pictures below.) Even with enough unallocated space before the 2GB mark, it still tries to copy the virtual partition to the inaccessible part.

Partition wizard's tech support simply told me to use a (paid) recovery software, which however can't detect the partition and tries to recover ALL files on the entire 3TB disk (even the ones in the healthy 2TB partition on it), ultimately mixing them together and making proper recovery impossible. Most annoying is that partition wizard detects the lost partition with all files and the correct file structure on it.

My actual question is this: does anyone know how partition wizard creates its mysterious virtual hard drive and partition (I have checked for .VHD files in my entire machine and there are none.) and where does it store the related files? I still have the windows.old folder, so perhaps i could recover the configuration files needed to make the virtual hard drive work again somehow.

In alternative, does anyone know how to solve this annoying issue and recover my lost virtual drive partition? I have a UEFI-capable motherboard installed in my machine.
I understand this is not exactly a win10 question, but i have nowhere else to ask. I used partition wizard in the first place because the win7 forums were often recommending it .







:)

 

Slow laptop performance by partition of Hard drive

Nope there shouldn't be, partitioning only basically virtually splits the drives, it has no effect on the hard drive, it just makes windows look at it differently. Just make sure you partition it correctly. No performance would be lost.

 

Can't see all my disk volumes in Win10 File Explorer

I had followed the procedure outlined in the article stated below and after installing the insider preview I could access all volumes and partitions on the installed Hard Drive. After updating the installed Win10 with the production
release I could no longer access them.



I could access the Win10 partition as Drive E: from Win7.



This lead me to try diskmgmt.msc in Win10 and I assigned a drive letter to the Win7 partition. Now all is good



Thanks

Bob

 

I solved my own issue. It was enough to use partition wizard to turn the file system of the drive to GPT. I thought it would delete the existing partitions for sure, but it did not. Afterwards it was as simple as performing a partition recovery with it.