Need emergency hard drive help!!!

[Brandon02TAWS6]

I was in the process of using Partition Magic 7 to increase the size of my
primary partition to 16GB. This partition contained Windows and drivers on
6GB. I had 145GB open on my E: drive and was using some of the open space
on there to add to C:. Both partitions are on the same hard drive. During
reboot while completing the process under Windows XP setup screen the
process froze. When I restarted the computer manually it gave an error that
said could be fixed once in windows. When I restarted again it went
straight into windows and now my E drive is gone and my C drive is still
6GB. What happened and can it be recovered? All of my programs were on my
E drive so I dont have access to anything other than windows components.
Thanks for all the help.

Brandon.

 

[Ice Czar]

first, dont try to do more than one thing in partition magic at a time
so youd resize the partition smaller first, reboot, then enlarge the partition next to it
almost invariably issues that do arise come from multitasking in Partition Magic

second, if you get a hang, give it several hours if necessary to clear
restarting is damn near 100% gurantee that youll screw the pooche
your just lucky your able to get back in

third, you make ERD disks?
if not

forth your options are, recovery or repair
for recovery of data, you do a direct scan and then write the info recovered somewhere else
Id recommend File Scavenger $40

for repair you attempt to rebuild the metadata in place, that being the partition table and or the Master File Table for NTFS or File Allocation Table for the Various FAT
Id recommend DIY Data Recovery'd Disk Patch $40

you might be able to recover the data with Knoppix (Freeware\GPL)
however, you will need the time and the space to download an ISO

 

[Brandon02TAWS6]

I downloaded file scavenger but it doesn't see the E partition to scan.

Could you give detailed instructions on what to do? Thanks.

Brandon.

 

[Met-AL]

Here's what I used to recover my boss's data. Got me out of a real pickle.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

Here's the story. I was going to do a clean install on my Boss's PC of Windows 98 (this was back in the day). He had lot's of stuff to save and it was at the time of "end of year reports and shit" that he had been working on for weeks. And I was lazy. I made a partition at the "end" of his drive, copied all of his C:\ partition to it. That was my so called backup (insert "What a dumbass comments here). Inserted the OEM restore disk from Gateway (yaa...I know...) and ran the restore program. Rebooted and just about died from a heart attack when that second partition was gone. Dam restore disk just wrote to the drive bit by bit...an exact image of the original install. Overwrote the MBR and partition table. So I downloaded Partition Recovery from the link above and ran it. In the demo mode, it lets you see what it finds, but you need to pay to have the ability to recover it. So I bought it and ran it. Recovered the partition, but still no dice. I then got sick of messing with this on his slow ass PC, ripped the drive out and put it on my PC which was faster, but more inportantly in this case, a Win2K machine. It picked up the recovered partition and I copied the data to a network drive and verified it about 10 times (figure of speech).

Moral of the story. Don't shrug off all those warnings about backing your shit up..especially the ones from utilities that do "low" level disk activities such Partition Magic.

Give this Partition Recovery program a chance and see what happens. It boots from it's own DOS floppy so you don't have to worry about things getting written over when your trying to save your ass..err I mean data.

 

[Brandon02TAWS6]

I was able to use Partition Recovery to recover the E drive but a good majoritoy or the files are listed as corrupt even if Partition Recovery sees them. Any way to recover the files too? Thanks for the help.

Brandon.