Raw Image of Unallocated Space

Hello,

I accidentally deleted the partition table on an external hard drive (I'm pretty sure that's it anyway, I'll explain below if interested*). I am going to try and recover the data with Acronis Disk Director later (and maybe I'll ask for help then if I can't figure it out).

But before I try to recover, I want to take a raw image of the external drive and store it on a seperate external drive (500GB on a 1TB drive) just in case. I know I'm being paranoid but there's a lot of sentimental things on that drive that I want to try my best to save. I am using Acronis True Image Home 10.00.

I cannot, however, figure out how to take a raw image of the disk since it appears as "unallocated space". Has anyone done this before, can you explain how?

Both external drives are connected usb 2.0. I can see the new one that has allocated space.

The drive was previously formatted to FAT32 before the partition table was deleted.

Thank you,
Boyd Howell

*I am sort of new to this backup and recovery idea, and Acronis in general.
I normally keep important informaion on both my computer and my external hard drive, however, I had a spyware on my computer and went to reformat. At the time, trying to reformat with the windows install disk, I had the external hard drive plugged in and thought it was a partition of my computer hard drive so I chose the option to delete the partition. I quickly realized what I did but it was too late. To me I think all this means is that the partition table was lost I think, please let me know if you think I'm wrong or anything I should check or do. Thanks!

 

Hello boyb,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

You are unable to backup unallocated space. If you created a backup of this external hard drive previously, you can restore the archive. Otherwise, you can use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0. The entire procedure is described in the User Guide for Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 available here, Chapter 5. Working with Acronis Recovery Expert

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee