Help! Partition Magic made drives unreadable

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calosIII said:
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).

PM has an undo feaure
 
Inaris said:

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...

The differences between NTFS and FAT have little to do with the sizes of hard drives that they were designed for.

You can see here:
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
... that both NTFS and FAT32 support up to 2TB.

You could theoretically use huge hard drives with FAT32 also, its just that its quite inefficient to do so.

The main difference is that NTFS is whats called a "Journaling File System" in that it records all disk operations in a "transaction log". This enables the system to autocorrect the consistency of the file system by reviewing the transaction log for any incomplete transactions. By comparison, FAT16/32 is a straight table-based allocation system. If a file is deleted and the PC crashes before the space is marked as free, then the space is lost, since there is no transaction log. This is why you had to run CHKDSK.

NT, by the way, stands for "New Technologies", not "Network Technology".
 
EricB said:
PM has an undo feaure

where? i thought that was only for changes not yet applied. when i click on General, the Undo Last Change option was greyed out.
 
do you create the 2 boot discs?
you should be able to boot from them and it shouldn't be greyed out here.
 
once again, thanks for your reply.
i haven't made the 2 disks yet. was about to but i read in the PM help section that among the unavailable features when running PM fm the rescue disks is - Undo Last Change.
i'll still give it a go. in the meantime, anyone else?
 
ok, first of all, you need partition, now and always.. When people buy computers, they don't usually have 4 hard drives to do whatever with.. and most people want to reinstall system without touching their personal data, so i use partition magic to cut a small chunk for system and a huge chunk for data..

i've always had success in resizing partition and add it to some other partition.. Though, they did say that they don't guarantee success, but i've never heard anyone fail yet :|

they actually have a undo last change on the rescue disk?! wow, that's something new.. i've always thought you can only undo changes you haven't committed yet.. let me know how well it goes :D

could it be your harddrive problem? as i had one of these unreadable thing before, but it turned out to my hard drive problem..

the last dreaded option is to format, and use recovery software to try to get as much back as possible.. though don't rely on it until you've run out of options...
 
thanks a lot for all yr replies and suggestions.
in the end i used PC Inspector File REcovery to et back all my data then i reformatted my hd. the software is free.
 
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