Major Hard Disk Problem -corruption

[jonny813]

Hi, I was just gonna install Xp afresh so I decided to also get ridof the two test servers I had on a multiboot system, however while Partition Magic 8 was working it moved the partition with My Documents on it, something must have gone wrong maybe a power cut, any way, I rebooted to find My Documents drive gone and am unable to give it a drive letter through partition magic or Computer Management - it says it is now in the format "PqRP" Is there anything I can do to get my Documents back, any advice grateful

I DO NOT ahvea a backup of my stuff as I was gonna do that straight after this

 

[LeeJend]

Post number 5 in this thread. You crashed during the repartition and PM left the data in an intermediate form. You may or may not be able to recover the data. Before doing anything I would make an image of the partition so that you can apply other recovery techniques if the PM help does not work. Some percentage of the files may be recoverable with other tools if the partition was not badly fragmented before the repartition effort. Check back after trying the link below for the other tools.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=77451

PS When do we backup?
Hint: the answer is not "after we do high risk procedures".

 

[jonny813]

thnx for the advice lol

I'm currently using Acronis Disk Director 10 which can read the data and is copying it to my 320GB external drive (knew it would come in use) Will keep posted as to whether it works or not as reference for anyone else

Woot! Just done it and all data recovered (go me lol) now got rid of all partitions and starting totally over with a black box thnx for your help guys was really worried (all my AS coursework etc)

Will backup BEFORE such operations again - been doing that for over a year and no problems so became slighty complacent

 

[ray_gillespie]

I'm glad to hear you got it sorted! Nice one.