how to recover a corrupted partition by Partition Magic

[Benzie500E]

Alright, I was trying to merge two partitions together. Unfortunately it hit a bad sector and the process got screwed up. I tried doing it with partition magic, and it supposedly has a recovery feature. It seems to have made a backup copy of the partition, or atleast its structure. I can see the partition in a partition viewer. It's partition #5 which is odd, and it is labeled PQMagic Backup.

When I start partition magic recovery disks it says "Searching for recovery markers . . . Please wait . . ." and then just freezes.

Unfortunately I made no backups before attempting this process. Its not on a computer that I care much about. I could reformat, but if at all possible i'd like to try not to.

I had two partitions, c: and e:, windows was on e: and so was most of my information. So I reformatted the c: partition and loaded XP back on to it. I can get in to XP but the e: drive won't show since its corrupted.

Any way of getting it back? Thanks guys!

 

[csniffer]

R u sure that the hard drive is OK. Sounds a bit suspect to me. But assuming it is ok and from what u have said its probably NTFS or fat32 then there is no reason why XP wouldn’t see the partition. U say the hard drive has a bad sector but this would still obviously not prevent XP from seeing the drive / partition. I think that something is missing from the information that u have given us even if u r not aware of it. As far as partition magic goes it shouldn’t affect how XP sees the drive. I think that u r going to have to except that the data on this drive is lost and reformat e at least but preferably the whole drive along with a write test.

 

[bcastner]

I wish you had not tried all of these repair options involving the partitions.

See if this helps. If not, download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility and do a thorough surface inspection and test. If it fails this you should RMA the drive. If it passes, reformat and start from scratch.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/

TestDisk: Partition recovery freeware