Stay AWAY from Partition Magic

[hucsman]

It's because I can't prioritize, that's why.

One day from my last thesis revision, and I notice that my windows installation is in a logical partition, while my documents are in the primary. I decide that one day from my last thesis revision, it's ok to try to fix this. So I start Partition Magic, change the identities, and hit the merge wizard just for the sake of it...

One hour later I have a $900 dollars paperweight.

Turns out the Wizard tells you it will remap your volumes AFTER the merge. Only bad thing is NTLDR, NTDETECT, BOOT.INI and a gazillion registry entries need this to be done BEFORE the merge. I should have known better, my other experience with a Symantec product (norton ghost) left me with some very nice silver coasters/Unreadable backup CDs...

Good thing is I backed up most of my data; all critical and some regular. I lost my music, though :(

[Cyker]

Yeah... Partition Magic is definitely something you do NOT use lightly!!

2k/XP's pain-in-the-arse drive mappings espescially make rearranging your partitions fraught with gotchas, as you have found out :( (9x never had this trouble!).

However, why have you lost all your music? If the merge went okay, all your data will be on one partition instead of two.
If your system just won't boot, you should be able to make a parallel install of Windows (e.g. make a 1-2 GB partition and just whack XP/2k on it) and when that's up, you should be able to see the other drive, even 'tho you can't boot off it.

You can do this any time as long as you didn't format that partition...

I carry round several CD's for this kind of thing (Most used are my two Linuxen (Knoppix, WHAX) and this kickass Windows-on-a-CD thing I found called BartPE) which can you can boot from and which allow you to read NTFS partitons.

(This is also why I never use NTFS except on corporate multiuser systems - It has no advantages for home users aside from journalling and better fragmentation resistance, but FAT32 is MUCH easier to recover data from; NTFS has almost NO decent disk-repair/corrupted file recovery software for it, and the ones that it does have are extortionately expensive :( )

[hucsman]

The music problem came from my inability to repartition (I'm not that computer literate). First thing I did was pop in the Windows disk and run recovery console. I ckdisked but still got "Access denied" to copy anything to blank media. Copied BOOT.INI and the others from another machine but still no go. Then I tried to diskpart (or something similar) but the recovery console version doesn't allow to create new partitions in already partitioned space. So I did a parallel install of windows like you said, but hoping I could fix the problem I installed partiton magic again in that fresh install to remap all references...
That's when it all went horribly wrong. I ended up saving some stuff, but for reasons I don't understand (since the stuff I was able to save was in the same folder) the music was gone.

[tapf!]

I'm using PartotionMagic too and I have no problems with it.

Fabian

[kmzpub]

Hi,

Actually, Active@ PArtition Recovery tool can be useful in such a situation. It really helped me before, and it is awesome. Really good soft, recommended!
http://www.partition-recovery.com/

[Jayman]

I downloaded a Linux based emergency boot CD some time ago, it has a Linux clone of paritition magic on it, and runs great!!!! I highly recommend .. Just do a google search!