hard drive no longer usable - partition magic crashed 1

[cmorris]

I have a 120 gb Western Digital drive (NTFS) that I use for data storage. My OS (WinXP) is on another NTFS drive. The data storage drive was initially partitioned into two 60 gb sections. I recently moved everything from one partition to the other and attempted to use partition magic 8.0 to delete the first partition and resize it into one drive. Here's where the problem occurred.

It deleted the first partition fine. It then resized the second to emcompass the entire drive. Then it attempted to 'move data' and froze up on me. I left it alone for a few hours hoping that it would resolve itself but no luck. I had to shut the application down. Now, when I browse the drive it states that "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". Partiton Magic gives me a "1507 - Bad file record signature" error when I attempt to do anything with the drive. I tried to CHKDSK the drive and it states "Unable to determine volume version and state, CHKDSK aborted". I even downloaded a drive utility from Western Digital but it hasn't helped. I have a ton of family digital photos and stuff on the drive but I can't figure out a way to access it. Any ideas?


Yeah, I should have backed up my data first before rolling the dice with partition magic ... hard lesson learned. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[jurgen36]

Probably the only way to recover your data is by using Runtime softwares "Get Data Back", this program normally should be able to recover all your data. Otherwise data recovery companies but they are extremely expensive. Good luck and regards.

Jurgen

 

[wolluf]

Get Data Back has a generally good press here. Might be worth googling for data recovery apps and see which ones have trial versions (so you can see if they are likely to work or not).

 

[NARSBARS]

Just lost a 160 with Part Magic. Got an error 19. The error was "at the end of something"
Yeah, at the end of my hard drive.

NARSBARS

 

[jasee]

In reply to the op, if you can boot into windows open up a cmd prompt window and type chkdsk (partition number /f. This should fix the partition. I've done this regularly and it works for me. If it's the partition that you boot from ie you can't run windows then start the recovery console and see if you can log onto windows, you can run chdsk /f from there.
It seems to be a problem with the master file table which partition magic (even version 8) will sometimes create which the graphical version of chkdsk can't fix.

 

[NARSBARS]

Thanks everyone. The HD is physically dead but after using Get Data Back on an older HD I am impressed. I had recently replaced one of my HDs and formatted it, and installed windows. Get Data Back was still able to recover some of the files from that unit. An excellent product at a good price.

NARSBARS