Please Help an Imbecile!

[mr_y82]

I recently added a 40 GB HD to my archaic 1.77ghz amd machine when I upgraded to a gig of ram.... I hope this is the right forum to post my problem in.

I had everything good to go, moved all the mp3s I had legally ripped from my own cds onto the new drive. Then I got happy with the partitioning magic (which I have used for years) but tried out something new. I tried to resize the clusters on the new HD from 4k to 512bytes... It appeared everything was going fine until the program had an error and stopped. The drive, which was called "music", now says "?0?" and windows does not see it. In partition magic, it still shows the drive, but it appears as though it has no free space (had about 5 gigs of free space prior to my stupidity). I did not back up the drive, is there any way for me to recover the data (freeware from download.com?)?????... The drive letter it had is still reserved for it (shows up in partition magic, but not in windows explorer)... Stupid, impulsive decisions FTL .

Your help is much appreciated, I thought using 512bytes would free up more space on the drive, not fill it up and then croak... thanks again for the help.

 

[hikaricloud]

Well...the only thing I can think of is formatting the partition, then using some sort of recovery software to search for all audio files...but the only programs I've used don't name files, so that can be a real pain unless the ID3 tags are intact. Maybe someone else will have a better solution.

 

[mr_y82]

Thanks. I will hold off on the format for now (until I see if someone has another solution), but I did recently use a free tagging program to make all my tags uniform, so luckily I could rename all the files using that same program if it comes to that.

I appreciate the quick response. I will try to post the actual error message tonight from home (I'm at work now).

 

[Tim]

If the drive does not show up in Windows, try going
>Right Click on My Computer
>Manage
>Disk Management

See if it is listed there (give it a few moments to recognise it), you may have to assign a drive letter... It might then be recognised.... possibly....

Good luck

 

[hikaricloud]

Definitely grab some screenshots, it'll help. I'm not sure if the formatted files would retain the ID3 tags, so I definitely wouldn't recommend doing that yet, haha.

 

[patonb]

try a Linux liveCD, like knoppix, or Xubuntu. They're small distros that should easily run on your system.

Then bit's as eassy as copy/paste to either a external or good partion... It should work if partionM says its there.

 

[mr_y82]

^ can I get those programs for free? at least to try? link?

I was wrong... the drive does show up in windows, it just has "no size"

now for some screeshots:

^ the new (used) harddrive already had the unused 7.8 mb that it didn't want to let me use... It would not let me add that free space to the main partition, so I was thinking about making a partition out of it and then merging them... but I didn't get that far.

edit: oh yeah... partition magic's "file browser" doesn't find a single file on the drive!

 

[patonb]

The linuxs are free, you boot to them from your CD drive.

 

[[t..o..m]]

looks like you need to reformat to me.

 

[mr_y82]

^ but is there a way to rescue the data first, or will I be able to retrieve it after a format??? (I'm going to pursue the linux route soon if format is the only other option)... I had about 10/30 gigs backed up on dvds .