Missing Partition Segments on Dynamic Disk

[denzen]

Hi,
I have an 8TB drive in Windows 11. It is a bulk use drive, the system/windows drive is a 1TB nvme. It was a dynamic disk with 4 partitions. The first was a 6TB partition drive P. The other 3 were partitions that were merged to show as one 2TB partition with a single drive letter M in Windows. There was some space between two of those 3 partitions. I wanted to increase the space represented by that drive letter M. I started with shrinking the first 6GB drive P down to a 5TB drive. The plan was to take the space left after that and add it to the M drive.

I bought a copy of AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro for this purpose. For some reason, it would not perform the shrink function in Windows and it restarted the PC in a Pro-OS state. I had already went through a long process of defragmenting the drive P in order to make resizing faster. But the resize process was taking several hours and did not seem to be showing any progress indicator, and the drive indicator on the PC was not active. The Pre-OS screen said it was still analyzing. I read somewhere in their forums that it was OK to stop a process that was still analyzing. It does not seem to be the case. While drive P was the drive being acted on, it was still intact after stopping in the analyzing stage. But the 3 partitions of drive D, which was not being operated on, are no longer being listed in either Disk Manager or AOMEI Partition Assistant.

The 8TB hard drive shows that it now as Basic GPT disk, when before it was a Dynamic disk. I use AOMEI Disk Recovery function of Partition Assistant Pro to see if I could see the drive, in both the short and long scan modes. They did not show up. I have not yet searched for files, just partitions. I am hoping that it is just the table showing where those partitions were that are missing, and that no data was moved. There was no "do not turn off your computer" warnings or "do not interrupt the process" warnings. Partition Assistant is advertised as changing disk types while preserving data through the process. Even so, there was no warning or information that there was going to be a change from Dynamic to Basic GPT to resize a drive on a Dynamic disk.

I have an email archive that has not been properly backed up in over a year, which is about the most critical data on the disk. They are Thunderbird email files, I'm guessing PST extension. I am not sure I moved all the family photos off of the drive. I know I did this for the P: partition, but I am not sure I did it thoroughly for M. I was not expecting a partition resize to cause this kind of issue, and I am even doubting if that was the only operation, but I am 75% sure. Are there logs of what was performed anywhere?
I have a new hard drive large enough to clone/image the whole hard drive twice.

AOMEI support has said the data is not lost. But their software is unable to see it.
I have done a scan of the unallocated spaces with R-Studio and there are many files recognized as being on the drive, but many are not recoverable. I am thinking it is because I am only doing the spaces, and not the entire drive. Will the full merged partition of the 3 segments for the M drive show up with a full scan?

I have included an image of the result after the shrink operation. I have installed a new Windows 11 on a different NVME, and as I am used to having a P and M drive, the new 22TB drive has new partitions to replace the old P and M drives from the 8TB drive, but that's not important I guess. To be clear, in the image, the 8TB drive used to have a 3 segment merged drive in the unallocated space.

Any ideas on how to proceed?
Thank You.

[Alt]

Any ideas on how to proceed?

A full disk scan, of course. Don't forget to save scan info. This article maybe of some help, although not much optimistic: Data Recovery After Partition Manager Crash.

[denzen]

Hi Alt,
Thanks for your reply. I'll get that started. The reason why I didn't do that right off is because it was estimating about 5 day scan time. I think I've figured out that it is possible to pause the scan, do things like reboot, and restart the scan later. Hopefully that is true, but I'll get it started anyway.
Thanks