Help! Partition Magic made drives unreadable

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calosIII

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hi all.
can someone please help me recover my data.
i have a 40Gb hdd split into 3 partitions. C (ntfs, 10G) for system files, prgm files and D and E (both fat32, both 15G) for data and docs. since my C drive was less than half full, i used Partition Magic 8 to free up some space and gave it to E drive. i used the resize partition wizard to do this. (1st time using PM).

now its done, all 3 partition sizes are what they're supposed to be but only my C drive is working. whenever i try to open D or E in explorer, it says "the disk is not formatted. do you want to format now?". when i click properties of D and E, both show file system as RAW and used space and free space as 0 bytes. the pie chart is all blue. when i go to the disk management utility it shows free space as 100% for both these drives. previously my free space was 17% for D and 16% for E.

i opened up PM again and its shows everything as normal. the correct partition sizes after the resize process, the correct size of used space and free space on all 3 partitions. so i assume that all my data are still there. just somehow windows can't read it.

can anyone help me out here please? lost of data and documents involved.
thank you very much..

p.s: win xp sp2, 256mb ram.
 
I will never, for the life of me, understand why people partition drives when drives are so cheap. Let me make a suggestion. Get out your wallent and buy a second drive and use it to store your files and back up data.. If I were you, I would go back to a system restore point in XP and see if you can restore prior to the PM changes. Let me know what happens when you use a restore point prior to the PM changes.
 
Maybe I'm wrong here, but isn't the reason because his active partion C: (NTFS) can't read a FAT partition?

But why would it work before and not now?
 
for staters, I'm in agreement with the above. You shouldn't need to partition a system. No help on "your" system...
second, I think, and suspect that the problem is in the FAT32 format you are using on the 2 later partitions. NTFS can deal with that kind of stuff, but FAT wasn't designed to deal with it.
I think that is where the problem lies. Try unsing partition magic to upgrade the formatting to NTFS and see if it works then... Also, might consider resettting the partition setting back and see if that correctes it...
Anyway, I would say what you did was a bad idea, but then that would be rude of me. So I'll wish you good luck, and hope for the best...

Bass... You are wrong. XP can read both NTFS and FAT. It's not the formatting that matters, it's the OS. As long as you have the logic to read from a format, it matters not what formats you are using. The difference is in the functions of each. Fat was designed for smaller drives, and provides less stability. NTFS was meant for larger drives and provides a great deal more stability. This is due to NT (Network Technologies) comming out with the need for large stable file stores. now it's not perfect, but it's a huge leap from FAT...
 
You are not wrong. XP would not read that file system if C: is NTFS. You need to bring up PM and redefine the file allocation protocal to NTFS for the FAT 32 partitions. PM will do that and then the data should reappear.

Edit: Once the data reappears, go buy another HD and save all your data a get rid of those partitions!!!! It's just cumbersome and not needed. The only rationale that may be reasonable is to make a very small 8mb partition on a slave dedicated to your page file if you have less that 1 gig of ram.
 
use pm to undo your actions

I don't know what you guys are talking about. you kinda right about it doesn't make sense to re-size partitions within windows, but you need partitions

Everybody computer that I ever fixed that doesn't have a built in system recovery, I partitioned the drive. it make no sense for anybody to have just 1 200gig OS drive.

at the very least I will partition it 2 ways. 1 15gig OS drive, the rest for my documents. now in the event of a virus or system corruption, I can reinstall windows without losing precious data. I use the xp cd to partition, by the way.

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56137
 
EricB said:
use pm to undo your actions

I don't know what you guys are talking about. you kinda right about it doesn't make sense to re-size partitions within windows, but you need partitions

Everybody computer that I ever fixed that doesn't have a built in system recovery, I partitioned the drive. it make no sense for anybody to have just 1 200gig OS drive.

at the very least I will partition it 2 ways. 1 15gig OS drive, the rest for my documents. now in the event of a virus or system corruption, I can reinstall windows without losing precious data. I use the xp cd to partition, by the way.

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56137

It makes sense to me....but I use 4 hard drives in my system because of huge PCM wave file mastering. My drives fill up quickly. But you make an excellent point about the OS in a smaller partition...hmmmmmmm that's worth pondering!!!!!

Edit: One final comment.....After momentarily pondering the issue, I believe you are quite right to make the suggestion for most puter users. There are exceptions like me, however, where my primary DAW contains more than 120 gigs of programs!!!! So I need a large capacity unpartitioned drive....but this is the exception not the rule.
 
Re:

Just as EricB quite simply highlighted...just undo the changes in Partition Magic...

...I would also advise that you use PB to create a set of rescue disks the next time you tweak your HDD with it (just in case your Operating System data becomes unreadable).

If you have created a set of rescue disks you can simply boot into them and you can undo the changes there.
 
RicoDirenzo said:
It makes sense to me....but I use 4 hard drives in my system because of huge PCM wave file mastering. My drives fill up quickly. But you make an excellent point about the OS in a smaller partition...hmmmmmmm that's worth pondering!!!!!

Edit: One final comment.....After momentarily pondering the issue, I believe you are quite right to make the suggestion for most puter users. There are exceptions like me, however, where my primary DAW contains more than 120 gigs of programs!!!! So I need a large capacity unpartitioned drive....but this is the exception not the rule.

I agree. your set up will probably be best for people that edit video too.
 
thanks for all the replies.
1st of all RicoDirenzo, i do want to get another hd. just that in my current situation, i cant even afford another 256m ram. but thanks fr the suggestion. its the 1st thing i'll look into when i have money to spare.

2nd, i should just use PM to resize everything back to like it was before correct? i'll try that.

3rd, should i convert the fat32s to ntfs' using PM? i've been using this setup fine fr quite a while but i'm getting here that its not good. (was setup when i know nothing about fats and ntfs. still dont know that much, only basic stuff).

i do have backups of important data but not everything. now i'm kinda afraid to make anymore changes before i'm really clear on what u guys suggest. (shoulda been afraid earlier huh. would've saved me a whole lotta trouble).
 
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