Partitian Magic unformatted my drive.

[lotstolern]

I have a desktop with two hard drives in it. Previously no partitioning. Created a small backup partitian using the Partitian Magic wizard and discovered that now, according to Win XP, the rest of the drive is unformatted. Partitian Magic still reads it as follows:
Dsk2_Vol1(H FAT 32 Active Primary with the right used and unused sizes.

When I use Windows checkdisk I get the message "The type of file system is raw." When I check for errors there are none. Whe I try to browse the H disk, the disk comes up without any files.

I haven't rebooted or written anything to this drive. I have high hopes that there is a relatively simple way to reverse the damage. Ideas anyone?

Eli

 

[wolluf]

Can you use PM to merge partitions back to single one - and see if that fixes it?

Did you just shrink existing partition to make room for new one?

There's a freeware data recovery app here

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

which many have had good results with on fat32 (if you don't manage any other recovery method).

 

[lotstolern]

I'm posting the resolution in case anyone else has the same problem. Nothing with PM was helpful in recovery. The free program PC Inspector was able to recover several main folders and their subfolders but not the critical ones. I downloaded several shareware programs and tried them out. The one that worked like a dream was GetDataBack for FAT v2.18 from Runtime. I was able to see what it could recover and actually view the file contents before making the decision to buy. Too bad PowerQuest doesn't package something like this with PM, it would make it a killer product.

 

[wolluf]

Eli - thanks for the feedback on that recovery app (I'm sure others will find it useful - its a recurring theme here).