This may seem like a stupid problem/mistake to many, but I've not got alot of experience with partitioning drives at all..

This PC has 2 drives, one 120gb with Win2k, programs etc, and one 200gb with music/work on. I need to dual boot the system to run some programs that only work with xp. So I went about partitioning the 200gb into a 170 and 30 for XP and those programs. PM said it needeed to reboot, as I expected, and it went into the DOS interface to do the process. All went fine in here, no errors, finished 100%.

System rebooted, but now windows sees the drive as D: (not S, as it was before, or X, as the partition was named) and completely unformatted. This is the case in My Computer and in Disk Manager, but in PM it sees S and the new partition as working drives.

Had no error messages throughout the process, any ideas as to whats gone wrong/how to recover much appreciated.

The drive letters in DOS/PM/Windows have nothing to do with each other. Feel free to assign any drive letter you like to your new partition in Windows Disk Management.

When you create a new partition then it is unformatted. This is normal.

...but if I format the drive, wont it lose everything that was on there already? Windows disk management doesnt see the new partition, infact it now sees it as a single 128GB drive, unformatted, un-active.

Any time you re-size/move partitions around you risk corrupting the data that exists on that partition/drive...
All third party programs that do this claim it is non-destruvtive and i believe none of them.
For safety sake i always creat and size partitions on an empty drive, or a drive i have created backups for already.
As a last ditch try booting to a knoppix live CD to see if you can retrieve/backup your data
Good Luck.

patio.

That's what I was worried about

I think I might be committing suicide this christmas, oh joy.

How exactly did you repartition the drive?

With partition magic, created new 30gb partition on the 200gb drive, it restarted and went through the process, rebooted again to windows and now I'm left with one D:\ which is unformatted and unreadable :/

But if you had stuff on the 200GB drive before then there should have been a partition too.

If PM (what version?) showed your drive as totally empty and you just created a new partition on top of your data.. Good luck getting anything back.

It never showed it as empty, when I first started PM (version 8) It showed both my drives as they were, C:\ as 120gb with about 7gb free, and S:\ as 200gb with 150gb free. I added the partition at the end of the free space on that drive. Which PM now sees as 30gb of unallocated space, but windows, as I said, just sees D: unformatted :giddy:

Do you have Windows 2000 SP3 or later? Make sure you have 48-bit LBA enabled in Windows.

Does your BIOS actually support drives bigger than 137GB?

Well it saw it as a single 200gb drive before I started all this, its actually on SP4 (still the latest?), so it shouldnt be anything like that.

Although now it only sees it as the dreaded 137 and unformatted, so **** knows whats going on there :suspicious:

check out this new sticky.. its about hdds above 137GB.

Click this Sticky!

Also i would never ever use thirdparty software to format a HDD.

i used partition magic about 4 years ago. it gave me some error number in the middle of partitioning process.. i looked up the error codes.. under my code number there was only some text explaining that powerquest doesnt understand that problem themselves.. and cant give any answer or something like that. and the HD became unuseable.

learn to use windows XP partitioning etc. but i would never use any partitionmagic-like program again.