Can you reset the filesystem on a partition/volume to NTFS without formatting?
I'm migrating the data on an old laptop to a new laptop. To accomplish this, I removed the disk from the old laptop and put it into a USB-SATA bridge. The first time, this worked fine, and I pretty much got all my files off the disk.
Then, I started installing apps on my new laptop, and one of the apps for a web service asked for my password, which I couldn't remember. I thought, okay, I can just eject the old laptop disk and put it back in my old laptop, boot it up, start the app, reset my password to something I remember.
So, I did an eject. I was told it was safe to remove the disk, so I did. Then, I put the old disk back in the old laptop and turned the old laptop on. I received a kind of pre-boot blue screen saying the NTFS was corrupted and would I like to repair. But, all the repairs it tried could not bring the old disk back to booting in the old laptop.
Eventually, I started a command line in Recovery mode, launched diskpart and looked at the partitions and volumes on the old disk. And, my old laptop Windows drive now indicated an unknown filesystem.
I shut down the old laptop, and put the disk back in the SATA-USB bridge. Now, it turns out this partition is also Bitlocker encrypted, but I have the decryption key and it WORKS! If I enter the wrong key, like a digit transposed, it won't unlock the partition, but with the right number Bitlocker lets me open the disk. It just can't understand the filesystem on the volume anymore.
While the old disk was in the SATA-USB bridge, I took a look at it with Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 and diskpart. I'm attaching those pictures here. It really looks like my disk is still intact, it's just "forgotten" that it is NTFS. Note that HDM reports an amount of free space that actually is pretty close to the free space I recall actually on the disk.
I don't know how the disk got into this state. Maybe there was a piece of fuzz when plugged old disk back into the old laptop. Is it possible something like safe boot, or - I don't know - Absolute Software Lojack has detected something fishy was going on because this old disk was moved out of old laptop?
So, my question boils down to whether there is a way using Hard Disk Manager (or through the command line, or the Powershell Command Line) to reset this disk/volume/partition to having NTFS as it's filesystem instead of unknown.
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