In Microsoft Windows operating system-based computer, you can attach external hard drive(s) to your system and access them concurrently. The external hard drives are generally used to transfer data from one computer to another or to backup data. However, in some cases, after you attach an external or secondary hard drive to your computer, system doesn't recognize main drive. The drive is displayed in BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) or My Computer. At this point, you can not access your hard drive partitions and come across partition loss situations. In order to recover lost partitions in these cases, Partition Recovery solutions are required.

You can try disconnecting all the secondary hard drives, expecting the main drive, to troubleshoot this issue. Reboot the system after disconnecting the drives. This method may work in some scenarios and may sort out your issue.

It the issue remains unsolved, you should try connecting the drive to another system, with same version of Windows operating system installed. Here you may see your hard drive in the Disk Management, but it is not displayed in My Computer. The disk may display file system as RAW and whole hard drive space as unallocated.

When you run the Chkdsk utility on your hard drive, for checking the file system and hard drive integrity, you may come across below error message and the dis checking gets terminated:

"No partition is bootable"

The structure of hard drive seems fine, but while accessing the drive, you get further error message stating:

"No partition found or selected for recovery"

This entire behavior of your Windows operating system indicates severe corruption to the file system. After file system corruption, operating system can not locate data and system files on the drive. Thus your system can not boot and the hard drive partitions become inaccessible.

In such situations, you need to format the hard drive and reinstall operating system to rewrite the file system. Though, this method works in most of the cases, but also removes all hard drive partitions. Thus you need to opt for Partition Recovery Software to retrieve lost partitions and stored data.

The Partition Recovery applications effectively scan the drive and Recover Partition in most of the cases. The have self-descriptive and interactive graphical user interface and thus do not demand sound technical skills from your side.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most efficient tool for all your partition loss problems. It recover FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, and NTFS5 file system partitions. The software is compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000.