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Disk partition overlapping: possible causes

During the process of storage scan, Recovery Explorer may spot an error related to disk partition issues. This is, namely, an incorrect size of a disk partition or even partition overlapping. The causes for this error can be absolutely different, yet, lead to the same consequence: the results of recovery scan may be incorrect.

Disk partition overlapping scan error

Disk partition overlapping may occur for one of the following reasons:

Disk is a part of a RAID or spanned storage

Disk is part of RAID

In case of a RAID, the logical volume you are trying to scan does not consist of a single disk. It relies on several logical storages which are unified into one system and don’t function independently. Therefore, you should take all the components and combine them into this system again. Luckily, R-Explorer in its RAID Recovery and Professional editions provide a special tool called RAID Builder. The latter will let you define the required configuration and general RAID parameters resulting into virtual RAID storage reconstruction and its preparation for further scan. RAID assembly is mandatory. If the RAID storage is not assembled before recovery, the storage will only contain a part of the data, and the recovery result is likely to be incorrect.

Incorrect storage size

Incorrect storage size

Hard drives attached via a SATA/USB adapter can raise some questions especially when disks are over 2 TB. A bridge chip of the adaptor may be incapable of transferring data located at large addresses because of its data transmission ability. For this reason, disk sizes displayed in the program can differ from the real ones. The same problem may also arise with internal drives in case of a poor bandwidth of an old motherboard.

Incorrect sector size

Incorrect sector size

As a rule, disk manufacturers define the size of a physical sector of a hard drive as 512 bytes or 4 KB. At the same time, logically it can be divided into 512 bytes, even if the size of a physical sector is 4 KB. If, for some reason, a driver error or misconfiguration in defining the correct sector size happens, the size of the partition can be defined by the program as smaller than it actually is or a partition may be recognized as the one with an overlap. In such a case, you can try attaching the disk via new hardware or just ignore disks partitions and run the full storage scan.

The corruption of partition metadata

Partition metadata corruption

Misreading of the partition metadata area may appear for a number of reasons including power outages or logical failures. As a result, the metadata area becomes overwritten with new information and can fail to be recognized or show incorrect information about the partitions. The only recommended scan option here is to make the software carry out a full-disk scan.

The software will inform you about the overlapping error in different ways. First, it may highlight the partition using the red color at the very start giving a corresponding warning at the information panel. Second, the same issue will be mentioned at the step of scanning.

Solving data recovery scan error

Recovery Explorer will attempt to fix the issue by adjusting the size of the partition to the disk size. Yet, it is important that you pay attention to the problem and try to solve it where possible for the purposes of a more precise data recovery scan.