hi all When i built my PC last year i put my OS on a partitioned 70gb HDD. It was split in to C: being 40gb and E: being the remaining 30gb, why??? i don't really know to be quite honest. Over the year the C: has become increasingly full to the point where i was within 2.5gb of it being full, so i thought i know the partition needs to come off to give me the extra space i needed. Now here is the problem, i installed a well known app called something like martition pagic and ran it, it fired up told me some info about my paritions being wrong sizes and then fixed them, shut down and never worked again. Now i'm left with no E: and a load of unuasble apps and no itune songs lol. It is still there if you check the disk management tool in vista but it has no options available to reletter the partition or anything and gives an error about refreshing or restarting. Is there anything out there that isn't $70 or more and is vista compatible that can help me restore my lost partition. please.....
hi seb, sorry it took so long to get back. although the second partition is visible in disk management you can't actualy do anything with it without an error message or warning coming up. The usual warning is: 'the operation failed to complete because the disk management console view is not up to date. refresh the view by using the refresh task. if the problem persists close the disk management console, then restart disk management or restart the computer' tried doing this time and time again to no avail, cannot format it as it throws an error up along the same lines as above. As with the C: and the D: it shows the lost partition as a primary partition with a size of 35.47 gb.
Sounds like partition magic somehow corrupted the drive. Best thing I could suggest at this point would be to back up what data you have left, then boot from a Windows install CD and reformat/repartition the drive the way you want it.
You can use the free testdisk to recover all your data before you do any other repairs. It has a addon called photorec that can recover data even from a corrupted hard drive. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec
hi all firstly i'd like to thankyou for your help, it was all greatly appreciated next i'd like to say i fixed it last night... wheyyyy go me !!!! i was reading through some posts on here whilst wondering what to do when i come across some free software that was vista compatible, so i dl it and it worked like a charm. It appeared that partition magic had somehow slightly overlapped both patitions and it would not let me reletter it. so i used this programme to shrink the lost 35gb by 9 odd gb then shuffle it right abit and call it E: again lol highly technical i know. Then i stretched the C: to take up what slack i had created and fanny's your uncle and bob'r your aunt all programmes working and no apparent lost data. for info the s/w i used was from here : http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm a big thanks to scorpNZ for that link....
