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Repartitioning Nightmare

A

apb1215

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 25, 2006
Messages
76
I bought a second HDD to act as my media drive. As a bonus, this was going to allow me to delete the multiple partitions I kept on my single drive for boot and media, which I have always hated having.

I am using Symantec PartitionMagic 8.0. After formatting the new drive, I copied all the files directly to it. However there were still things like documents on the old drive that I wanted to keep there, but there was no longer a need to partition them separately. So I did a "merge partitions" in PM, thinking this would combine my two, now unnecessary partitions back into a single.

Well, I let it run overnight, and woke up to Chkdsk asking for a reboot. I rebooted, and now I am left with the original, boot-only partition, and the second partition, with all my remaining data, has simply been deleted. They were not merged whatsoever. There is a folder on the boot partition, that my merged items were supposed to go into, but it is empty.

Needless to say, my documents were very important, and I certainly didn't expect a supposedly helpful program would wipe them out! Please help me if you have any ideas. PM has an "undelete partition" option that I have been trying to run on the deleted partition, but of course, it says it cannot find any undeleteable partitions.
 
Intuitively, an English-speaking person would think that the term 'merge' is synonymous with 'combine' - but in partition-management-speak the Merge function does exactly what you described.

That's exactly what my Paragon PM software Merge function would do.

You could try to recover data with Recuva or other app, but I suspect that the data may have been effectively 'wiped'. If you do attempt to recover the lost files, recover them to either another partition or another drive, to prevent file over-writing.

Annoying!
 
try getdataback from runtime.org, it will show you what can be recovered, but then you have to buy the app to recover them.

App is well worth the price,,,its paid for itself several times over for me.
 
I don't mention of what operating system is in use here, but if it's Vista, 32 bit or 64 bit, or heaven forbid Windows 7, well... Partition Magic should be burned and destroyed forever because it's 100% incompatible with how Vista and most especially how Windows 7 handles partitioning schemes now.

It hasn't been updated in over 4 years - take the disc you have or the bootable media and destroy it, it's useless software now. </rant_off>

Go get Parted Magic instead, superior product in almost all ways, and totally free because it's open source. Updated on a regular basis also.

Recuva only works with the Recycle Bin and this is a situation where the data is gone completely (it's not but as far as the OS is concerned there's nothing there because the partition itself is de-partitioned and "invisible" for all practical purposes). My recommendation would be to get TestDisk and take your time going through the software's options. It's a great product and can perform some small miracles if you're careful and you pay attention... rush into it and forget getting that data recovered, possibly making things worse.

Good luck...
 
Joe Average said:
My recommendation would be to get TestDisk and take your time going through the software's options. It's a great product and can perform some small miracles if you're careful and you pay attention... rush into it and forget getting that data recovered, possibly making things worse.

Good luck...
Click to expand...

TestDisk was able to locate the partition! I did a rewrite of the partition table, and I am actually seeing the partition returned to My Computer.

Only one problem. When I try to open it, I get "D:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." Then when I look at properties it says the File System is RAW.

Is there still hope??
 
FYI Here is what TestDisk is showing as my Partition Table:

Partition Start End Size in Sectors
1 * HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 6681 254 63 107346267 [Boot]
2 E extended LBA 6682 0 1 60800 254 63 869421735
5 L HPFS - NTFS 6682 1 8 60800 254 63 869421665
 
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