Failed clone unallocated 800GB of files on my 6TB Western Digital MyBook

If anyone could help in any way it would be greatly appreciated.

To start off I have three hard drives that I was migrating data on to one single 6TB WD external hard drive that was allocated as "DRIVE (I:)" . For two of the drives I was moving all the data I wanted by just cutting and pasting on to the new 6TB external drive, but the third drive was bootable with windows so I was looking to clone onto the 6TB external drive. At this point I have 800GB of data on my external drive from the other drives. I go to clone the drive with "Macrium Reflect" and I ended up getting an error of some sort that I can't remember so I ended up making a new partition on the 6TB external drive that was 600GB so it could fit the clone thinking it was going to work, which it did work. About 10% the way through the cloning I noticed that my (I:) partition with the 800GB of my data on it SOMEHOW became unallocated so I aborted the clone, now I am sitting here lost not knowing what to do. I'm unsure if this would be an easy fix to get my data back or not which is why I am posting here. I also summited a ticket on Macrium Reflects website, but since I was using the free version of their software it's highly unlikely they are going to respond.

I will provide a picture of what my external drive looks like now in disk management. The drive circled in red is the drive I was cloning and the drive circled in green is the external drive after trying to clone.
Disk.jpg

I will also provide a picture of the log of the clone if that is of any help
de9051257ae562f5e83626fcb3d310d8.png

I appreciate any help in advance
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So Disk 4 had both a partition (G:) and (I:) before you copied the 800Gb of data to it? Or did you create the 600Gb partition after you'd already copied the data?
 
Jared":308h0286 said:
So Disk 4 had both a partition (G:) and (I:) before you copied the 800Gb of data to it? Or did you create the 600Gb partition after you'd already copied the data?

I created it after I had moved the data.

When I setup the WD My Book drive I allocated it's full size as partition (I:) then went about cutting and pasting the 800GB of data from my other 2 drives. Another thing to mention is I'm pretty sure when I made the new 600GB partition it was assigned as (D:) because I remember double checking in Macrium Reflect to make sure I was cloning to the correct partition. I have no clue why it changed the drive letter to (G:)
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So how did you create the 600Gb partition? Windows won't allow shrinking a partition from the front end, only from the back end. So you either had to have used some thrid party utility or deleted the existing partition before creating the new one.
 
Jared":3ea5amw4 said:
So how did you create the 600Gb partition? Windows won't allow shrinking a partition from the front end, only from the back end. So you either had to have used some thrid party utility or deleted the existing partition before creating the new one.
I used no third party utility. I created it by clicking my (I:) partition and right clicking to shrink volume. I was under the impression that windows only allows you to partition space that is not in use on the drive. My memory is kind of blank now after all this happening, but I’m almost sure after shrinking and allocating the new partition as drive (D:) I went back into file explorer and I still had my (I:) partition + the new 600gb (D:). If what I just said would be impossible to do/happen then where do I go from here on trying to get at least some of the data back if even possible now?

Also thank you for responding and helping, it really means a lot
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
If you shrank the partition in Windows disk management, the free space would have been to the right of the existing partition, not to the left. My guess is that you shrank it, then imaged your other partition over the top of the partition that held the already copied files (overwriting them in the process).
 
Jared":135hqjy7 said:
If you shrank the partition in Windows disk management, the free space would have been to the right of the existing partition, not to the left. My guess is that you shrank it, then imaged your other partition over the top of the partition that held the already copied files (overwriting them in the process).

Yes, at first when I created the new partition I had partition (I:) which was the original one taking up the full space of the drive and then the new one which I gave drive letter (D:) to and is showed up on the right of partition (I:). When I cloned I made sure to selected partition (D:) which is when I noticed the new partition (G:) and my original partition (I:) with my data in it become unallocated. Almost like Macrium Reflect created partition (G:). Which still leaves the question of how the rest got unallocated... and why the (D:) partition is now only 5.7 GB.

If in fact my data got overwritten would me stopping the clone at 10% help me at all with recovery if recovery, is even possible? I have little to no resources being a broke college student and Macrium Reflect has now closed my ticket with them with no response. Cloning the drive wasn't really even necessary and I'm beating myself over it now with how many personal files I lost.
 
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