dissapearing partitions PLEASE HELP

[Guest_imported]

Guys I am in serious trouble. I recently decided to tri boot my system with win 98 (for games) win 2000 (for day to to day use) and Linux (just for fun). To do this wiped my hard drive and used fdisk to set up 2 2gig partitions one for 98 and one for 2000. I first installed win 98 on c:, installed drivers and no more. Next win 2000 on d: and again the drivers etc. Finally I loaded Linux and used disk druid to create a 3 gig Linux partition and a 500meg swap partition. All went O.K. and I dedided to run the machin as was for a week or so to ensure stability. Again no problems.

Now trouble starts. Was laid off at work (no big deal) and had to return my laptop. As usual I had a load of information on the work laptop I needed to keep. Contact info and some little utilities I use etc. I decided to take this oppertiunity to use partition magic to create 3 more partitions. Two 15gig partition for games and apps and One 5 gig partition for fun, mpegs, wav files and to backup my files from the laptop. Using my games hub I backed up all my info from laptop onto the 5 gig partition and at the same time loaded up my favourite games and apps to the two 15 gig partitions.

Happy with my nights work I retreated to bed and following day formated the laptop and returned it. Imagine my horror and shock when I turned on my pc to discover that all my partitions except c: my windows 98 partition had disapeared. I cannot boot win 2000 or linux. From a dos boot disk only c: is visable. Partition magic sees only c: and declares the rest as free space. Fdisk sees c: and a 2 gig extended partiton which is full but detects no drives in it.

Help guys I really need the info from my laptop. I backed it up weekly on ot server at work but I know that when I left all my files would have been removed.

Any ideas would be greaty appreciated.

Sparkey

 

[InsanityRmx]

I think you're out of luck, knipex. I never had much luck mixing partitioning programs, i.e., fdisk, disk druid and Partition Magic. Using one for *all* partitioning seems to work fine (Partition Magic in my case).

Check the Partition Magic web site for some advice. One of their utilities may be able to recover your lost partitions, but don't get your hopes up too high. Your partition table (on the outside track of your HD) is screwed up. All the data is still on your HD but none of the OSes know how to get to their respective partitions without a good partition table.

About the only advice I can offer is work backward. You used Partition Magic last, so try to recover those partitions first with one of their DOS utilities. Get the latest version if you don't have it already - the 'utilities' are better. Don't try to use a Win98/2000 or a Linux app. and don't write anything to the hard disk until all partitions are visible again. You must boot off a floppy or CD - don't try to (re)load an OS on the disk to help you recover anything - that will permanently screw it up. Even though you can't fix it now, you can still back up whatever is left on it with disk imaging programs like Norton Ghost. Of course, you would need another drive at least as large. The only benefit to doing this is that you can 'try' to fix the original disk with various utilitites. If you're unsuccessful, you can still restore it byte-for-byte to it's original screwed up state and try again!

I feel your pain on this one. Good luck.

 

[Guest_imported]

InsanityRmx

Thanks for the interest. Time for an update. I tried partition magic utilities and they gave me a message partitions screwed up backup and reinstall partitions (well that was the gist of it).
I finally gave up and risked norton utilities which amazingly enough restored two of my partitions and YAHOO my back up files were on one of the partitions. I backed these up onto an old hard-drive of mine (1gig) for safety and low level formated the entire disk. I then repartitioned the disk using fdisk (using you advice) and reinstalled win 2K ands win 98. I then played with the system for a day. Installed word and saved a few files. Installed one game and played it making a few saves and bang partitions start to disappear.
I retried it with another machine (one I am fixing for a friend) and same problem. I did some research and found that a lot of people with win2K are having disk drive problems, even a few on this site and most are blameing hardware. Well I have news people it is not hardware its WIN2K is the culprit. I have reset up with win 98 and linux only, I set up 15 partitions (its just a test)and have installed and uninstalled every program I own at lease 4 times. I have saved games exel files, word documents edited them, purposly crashed the machine, pulled out the power lead and guess what ????

I still have 15 partitions and my machine is stable.....

I have now decided to stick to win 98 SE and Linux to hell with Win2K and even XP. Windows 98 is a stable platform with proven drivers available for everything and it will play all my games no prob.

I have learnt my lesson if it works leave it alone DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR SOFTWARE UNLESS U HAVE TO........

Knipex