Partitions lost

[rumpage]

I know my problem is similiar to Eyes Only, but i thought its best starting a new thread.

I had 3 partitions on my 80 gb HD, and had so in 2 months.
C: ~2 GB
D: ~37 GB
E: ~37 GB
As the free space on C: was running low I decided to move 500 mb from D: to C: using partition magic 8.
When it started to move i got error #122, bad sector. Then i thought "Hmm, maybe i can just merge C: and D:"
Again I got error #122, and when windows booted D: and E: was gone, but my CD-drive has letter F still.
I have a strong feeling the damage can be recovered (I havent write any data over, did I?), i just dont know how?

I would appreciate help quickly, got some important school work lying on my old D: :bawling:

[beatz]

It would be nice to know how exactly your hd is partitioned now. When you say your partitions are gone, do you mean that they are not shown by partition magic anymore? If not, what does it show? To confirm the output from partition magic you could use a dos tool called fdisk. Just open up a command prompt, type in fdisk and use it to get your partition information and post it here. We'll go from there.

greetz,
michael

[rumpage]

I checked into this matter a little more, i used a program called Active@ Partition Recovery. It found the two lost partitions, 37 GB each, and 1 GB free space.
It also claims it able to fix them, unfortunately only in full version.

Anyone know a free program that can recover lost partitions?

About F-disk: dont work, its not there... And my C: dont have space for Partition Magic now :(
partitions are as followed:
C: 2 gb
Rest of my hd is ~73 GB marked unlocated, but there is 2 x 37 GB NTFS partitions and 1 GB unlocated...

[beatz]

Sorry, I dont know much about partition recovery programs. The only way that i could help you is, if you happened to know the EXAKT size of your former partitions and then to try to restore them manually.

Maybe somebody else here knows of a program that might help you, since letting a program do it automatically would be the easiest way, if it works.

Also, maybe you find one yourself using google.

michael

[rumpage]

I can get the exact size of my old partitions if really needed but doing it manually sounds like alot of work...
Im away late tuesday to wednesday, so if i havnt got my hands on a program that is able to do it i would have to go the manual way i guess..

[beatz]

It's not that much of work as it sounds. You just have to be sure about the exakt size. One other thing is, that you need to know if those partitions were primary or logical ones.

Actually, if you know what you are doing it is done in a couple of minutes. It is done by using the fdisk tool, which should be built into your windows. It was used as dos partitioning tool, back when you had boot disks ;) . Maybe it would be a good idea to do it with a boot disk anyway, since windows might get in your way. Also it might be possible from inside windows, but I am not sure since I have not used windows partitioning tools for a while (I migrated to linux).

As far as my jugdement goes, it cant really hurt trying it manually since it is completely reversible. If you feel like trying it, i can give you the technical background in a couple of sentences and you are ready to go.

michael

[rumpage]

Cant see why not...
I have a dos boot disk lying somewhere with Fdisk...

Yay!
Got E: back :D
However, the program i used (acronis recovery expert) could not find D: (which active@ could)
When i got E: back, i also got partition magic back...
Size MB Pri/Log Type
C: 2000,2 Primary NTFS
* 3 9001.6 Primary (unlocated)
E: 37 158.2 Logical NTFS

And, Thanks for the help so far.

[beatz]

that's cool! :thumbsup:

Do you know what the * means? Does it mean unallocated, i am not sure because it says primary next to the partition. so it seem like pm recognized it as a partition, there just might not be an letter asigned to it.

Also any chance you can get pm to give more information about your * partition, maybe like a properties option or something.

michael

[rumpage]

Partition Magic has this function undelete, but áfter a while i get "access violation".
If i press "properties" it will only get information about physical sectors...
Going to test acronis once more before i go to sleep...

[beatz]

The thing is you could just recreate the partion, as long as you DONT format it in the process. The information about where partitions are on your hd is saved in something called the partition table stored at the beginning of your hd. that's where the bios and the os is looking for partitions. If it not in there windows will not see it. What might have happened is that part of it got lost during the merging.

What might has caused the problem is a bad sector on your hd. The data is stored in small units on the hd called sector. When your hd is broken in one place, it can't read the sector. You should have used scandisk before working on your partition to prevent that.

So pm tried to to the operation and stopped when it found a bad sector. So it seems that it deleted the information about where the partition is from your partition table. So it might work if you just create a partition of the same size, also of the same kind ( logical or primary ) at the same place on your hd. Just make sure that there is no formating going on in the process. Then the partition will be found be windows again.

The problem is if the filesystem of that partition is still ok. The filesystem is how the data is organized on the hd by the os. IF pm has not started to move any data before it stopped working it should be okay. Since creating a partition is simply an entry in the partition table, you can just delete the partition i.e. and everything should be like before. Its good to use fdisk for it, since it only writes to the partition table and doesn't try to format anything. Make sure that you specify the type (ntfs) when you create the partition.

good luck and good night ;)

michael

[Tex]

If you have not overwritten new data into the area you need to recover then email me before this gets more mucked up and I'll help you recover it if you have a second disk to copy the recovered data to

Tex

[rumpage]

Thanks for the help...
Since most of my important files and programs were on E: (which i got back) im happy. It seems like D: dont want to be restored, but i dont mind, only games and music mostly.