A partition on a hard drive has disappeared

A fair question. When I could not find the second "drive", I began to doubt my memory. I was 99% sure that the 2 drives I had were actually just one partitioned drive. When I could not find the one drive and the other was just fine, I opened my old PC up and scoured for a another drive. I found neither another standard drive nor a solid state drive.

Thanks for the idea.

There are no other hard drives on the PC. I opened it up and even plugged in the DVD drive into a SATA connection in case something was hiding there. There is nothing that even vaguely looks like a regular or solid state drive. Unless it was built right into the mother board or video card, I can find no other drive. This confirms that the „C:“ and „D:“ drives that I saw on the old PC were actually one partitioned drive. I remember this being in the specs.

The old drive was 3000GB. It shows only the „D:“ files, but has 1.91 TB of data on it. This would be about right for both (C+D) drives together. I remember the D drive being only about 40% full (ca. 1.4 TB) and the C drive being completely full at ca. 0.5 TB. I never wrote this down, so I cannot be sure. In any case, the data must be there somewhere or I’m missing something.

Do you think a PC repair person could repair/replace the mother board and get the old PC running again? The BIOS had become corrupt and the PC would not start. I could not even get to the start-up screen or the command line. It went into a continuous loop seconds after being turned on. Dell refused service. The PC was roughly 8 years old.

Thanks for sticking with me. This is a real mystery movie.

It looks like I may be out of luck. I did not purposefully try to resize the partitions, but I did explore all of the windows disk management tools. I might have accidentally changed something. The problem is that the „C:“ partition was missing from the very beginning. I have not seen evidence of it since my old PC died. If something changed, it changed at the first boot on another computer.

I tried the EASEUS software last week. I did „partition recovery“ and it says „Unsupported Disk“, „Dynamic Disk, GPT disk and bad disk are not supported“. I also did „data recovery“ and it found lost data, but none of it looks like what I am missing. I also ran AOMEI Partition Assistent. It found nothing after a 24 hour scan, but it did show a 128 MB „partition“ on the drive that had no letter. This is way too small, but interesting. There are some „lost files“ on this partition, but they all look like system files.

I definitely did have a C partition on the old PC. The Data partition has no windows folder. As soon as I hooked up the old drive to my new PC, the C partition was no longer there. I tried on another PC to be sure it wasn‘t something with the new PC and also connected the drive directly into the motherboard (rather than through a USB-SATA connector). No evidence of the „C“-„Windows“ drive has been detected. I realize that this makes no sense. I am missing something, but I am clueless as to what.