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