Partition Magic Stuffed Up

I decided to merge my Data F and Photo G partitions and I have done this before with no problem.

It came up with an error message and then I found I had lost my drives. I found one logical drive without a letter in PM but it was not showing on My Computer so I gave it a letter and I got it back. But I have lost my photo partition and although most of the photos are backed up there are some new ones not backed up yet including precious photos of my cat being funny.

I have tried system restore which tells me it cannot restore my drives as they were and looked in the recycle bin . Is there anything else I can do to get my photos back? The new data partition is showing all the drive space it should so I guess my photos have been sent to oblivion?

There is an empty folder in my data partition which I cannot delete and I guess this was my photo folder?

System Info Windows XP Pro PM8 and 200GB SATA drive

Before you do anything else, go to pc inspector it has a free recovery program.

You install it on the drive/partition that is NOT affected and tell it to recover what it can off the drive you choose. You then can copy what it finds to an unaffected drive/partition.

Saved my bacon a few times this has... and the one for usb flash drives is good too - but you want the one for hard drives. It is very simple, but not immediately obvious, so take a look at the tutorial.

I can't do that Noo because PM had already merged my drives before it had the error and the total space of the two drives is now on the one drive. I will try it anyway, maybe the empty folder I cannot delate has hidden my files.

ADDED LATER

I downloaded and installed the program and it is very very slowly finding pictures but the thumbnails will not expand. Because it is an NTFS drive it is in slow mode and the partition is over 140GB so it will take all night, it can carry on while I go to our local choir! I much prefer singing Berlioz etc to watching paint dry! It has only found two files in about 15 minutes and they are not the ones I want. I have most of the files over several CDs but in disarrangement. Thank goodness I backup my photos and keep all the old ones even if I update the backups. Makes me want to weep as I have to sort them all over again.

I am not too sure if its any help at all Morse Lady but there was a time you could make a set of bootdisks for PM and boot to dos and recover partitions with it. Now i did recover a deleted partition but it only worked once for me.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/convert.html
Maybe worth a try

Thank you Ferrit.

I am going to try something. System Restore cannot help because the partition is deleted so I am going to re create that partition and maybe just maybe System Restore will help. Just in case it goes wrong I have backed up the contents of my data partition to a folder in my system partition but most of it is on DVD anyway.

The worst case scenario is that I do have all the photos on CDs and DVD except a few taken this year but it is going to be a lot of work getting it all tidy again.

That is for another day because if I don't have my tea and get my glad rags on I will be late for choir.

It seems I may have a corrupt drive. I am unable to do anything in PM and it now refuses to acknowledge my data drive. When I try to do something in PM and go to apply I get two dialogue boxes one says Error 983 too many errors process halted and the other says Error 1607 file record marked free file 20544.

I better get everything off it just in case which means choir for me is cancelled!

I have done chkdsk. I do remember some months ago having a virus or worm on the computer which Norton could not get rid of but it does not show up now. I have been having problems with my browser and other things.

My computer only has one hard drive and what you suggest sounds far too complicated for me.

I have decided to uninstall and reinstall Partition Magic which I recall became corrupt and did a similar thing on another computer some time ago. I have now located all my photos on CDs and DVDs except for a few I took recently which are lost forever but they are replaceable as my cat is a good subjhect and the other were of my garden. I have backed up the contents of my data drive in case anything else goes wrong. I will leave it at that because it is beginning to make me feel stressed. I might even dump the lot all my computers I am getting really fed up with them!

Thanks everyone.

I think OMG is just saying if you slave your corrupt drive to another XP machine/installation, you will be able to recover the files.

But if you are satisfied with what you got, then all's well.

Sorry Noo but I don't know how to slave a drive or whatever, I have forgotten everything I ever learned on the MCP courses. I am still not out of the woods re the nervous breakdown and am missing my husband more than ever and my mind is all fogged up and I have lost my short term memory. Computers have become a challenge for me. I think I will try and reinstall PM and see if that works and then just leave things alone. I think in future if I get a problem I cannot fix I will take it to my friends at the little shop which has been here for years.

OMG sorry and thank you for trying to help but please regard me for now as a dumbo and forget I was a geek once.

No problem Angie, I would do the same in your position. You still are not a dumbo.... as far as I know you don't have very large ears and a cute expression... :D :D

Noo thanks for making me laugh, I really needed it :thumbs2: I tend to take my computer too seriously at times. Hey it works at least :) so there is no hurry to get it fixed and maybe if I leave it alone and come back to it the fog will lift from my mind :eek2:

Anytime.:)

That wasn't the point at issue OMG. The issue was the MorseLady felt to stressed to go through the procedure you described and recover a few photos.

I know that those photos could probably be recovered, as does MorseLady... but MorseLady felt it was not worth the time and the hassle involved.

You might also be able to run Spin Rite 6.0 on the drive I have had decent sucess with it repairing errors in the past. I think it's still shareware. Not sure how it will work with PM.

In that case, it would be worth setting out the instructions in a simpler to read format.

Putting everything in one paragraph makes it difficult to separate the steps involved.

I managed to clear the fog from my stressed mind to sort it out. It was so easy I don't know why I did not think of it before. I had to forget some of the rather confusing information on here from OMG and start again.

The real issue was that I could not partition, merge or re allocate disk space. Most of the lost photos are on DVD and the few I took this year and had not got round to saving have since been replaced with new photos ie the garden looks the same and my cat obliged this morning lying in a funny place and I have lots of new and better photos.

Realising that the problem was only on the extended partition holding my two data drives including the one that PM lost I decided to schedule a deep disk scan in Windows from the affected drive properties. This took over an hour and I could see from the information on the screen that there were very big problems indeed. Once Windows had rebooted I went to PM and created a new second data partition and everything is working fine now.

I now have a system of running backups on a USB flash drive and these are transferred to my other computer in a backup folder until there is enough to justify burning to disc.

Noo I am grateful to you for your patience, think it helped me think straight :thumbs2:

My pleasure Angie. Sometimes it's best to walk away and let your subconcious do the work for a day or so. The only thing I hate about that is that I get the answer between 2 and 4 in the morning which wakes me up- and then I have to find a pen and paper before I forget again!

Noo the idea came to me just as I was about to go to bed and I resisted the temptation to stay up and sort it out then because I knew I might make mistakes and also that the disk checking is a long process if you tick a certain box :cool:

ADDED LATER:

Just done an audit of my main data drive with a calculator and the contents only account for about half the used space, any ideas why this should be so?

hidden files and system files perhaps?

hyberfil.sys - hibernation info
recycle bin reservation
system restore reservation
pagefile.sys - swap file reservation

Did you do the calculation in bytes, kb, mb or gb?