I feel your pain! And this lengthy reply may hopefully relieve yours.
At a summit on Computer Forensics last spring, one of the lecturers
from the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) referred to the
aforementioned partitioning program as "Partit**n Tragic" (guarding
myself against defamation, etc.). In my case, unlike yours, it didn't
only hiccup, it puked - like "a guy I know", after too many hours and
beers, margaritas and straight shots of Jack Daniel's at a "dance"
club. Partit**n Magic/Tragic has toasted my MBR and FATs a couple of
times before (most recently in December, on my main machine). At the
time, I had an 8.7GB Win2k C:\ partion-only boot drive of 3.5GB
formatted size, and 40GB and 80 GB Maxtors for programs and data, each
having several partitions. The 40GB started intermittently failing,
so I transferred all of my data to the 80. I removed the 40.
I put in a new Western Digital 120GB temporarily as a place to unload
some of the stuff off the 80. Then I made the fatal mistake - running
"PM/T" from the 8.7 boot drive, I partioned the 120 to accomodate a
Win2k primary partition, with the appropriate virtual volumes in the
extended partition, and formatted them.
Upon reboot of the 8.7, I looked for the other two drives. They
weren't there. Running PM/T showed them as "Bad" and unformatted
space. A bootable DOS floppy couldnt see them either. I also booted
Knoppix 3.3 from the CD, and it showed the hda1 Win2k drive, with its
contents OK, but only hdb1 and hdc1 - no data, and no other hdb or hdc
"drives".
I next ran ByteBack Data Recovery (from DOS), and after about 15 hours
of scanning, and examing in detail several potential root partitions
for recovery, I gave up. ByteBack is a fine program. I had done this
before, and it is an excrutiating process, although generally
effective for individual files recovery. I was now facing the chore
of hex editing the MBRs and counting sectors to where the partitions
should begin to get the whole shebang back. I have to admit that
during my self-training, I have yet to successfully get anything
exactly right on test drives using the hex edit process.
At that point, I then focused on putting a stable OS on a bootable
partition of the 120. So, I wiped the 120 with the Western Digital
install floppy and went out and got WinXP Pro. During setup, I set
the main and extended partitions that I would need, and formatted and
installed XP. After the reboot - hello - there was the 80GB drive,
with all data restored!
I'm not knowlegeable enough to figure out how writing a new MBR, FAT
and partition tables on the new 120GB drive with WinXP brought back
the MBR, FAT and and partition tables on the 80GB drive. I'm gonna
check on that. Meanwhile, I am happy now, better than ever, and I put
the PM/T CD through the shredder.
Hey all, hope you can help... PartitionMagic saw that I hadn't made rescue
discs and decided to teach me a lesson
I have 3 hard drives - a 60 gig internal, an 80 gig internal, and an 80 gig
external FireWire. Drives 1 and 2 have two partitions (c/e and d/f, drive
letter-wise), while the external has one partition. All are ntfs.
Anyway, PartitionMagic 7.0 hiccupped, and now drive F: shows up as
unformatted. I downloaded some utilities and can see that my files are
still there, but I will need to pony up the dough to recover these files.
I'm wondering if there's a way for me to reset the F drive partition to
ntfs, or should I just pay for the full license of the utilities I tested
and find some way to make room for 70 gigs of info temporarily. I have
some computer knowledge, but apparently not enough to figure out how to do
this on my own.
Thanks in advance!
e-mail modified, take the ** out to reply!
Regards, TW
kilocycles***@***yahoo.com
