Hard Drive mistake

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I need some help. I have a Maxtor 40gb drive with 4 logical partitions on it with about 3gb unused at the end. The other day I thought I would use Partition Magic to allocate the free space to the partitions. The program crashed due to lack of memory part way through moving the F: partition, (the first operation in the batch file). When I rebooted the system F: was no longer there.

I ran PM again and it showed the partition as 'Other'. It wouldn't let me do anything except get info or delete it. I searched for several days to find a program to get the partition back and found two, one costing $70 and one free called Ranish partition Manager. The latter allowed me to change the partition to be FAT 32 again and it became visible but only some of the data is there. The balance seems to have been changed to a lot of garbage folders along with files which, although they still have the correct name, wont open.

Does anyone know how I can recover the data or what I did wrong, (besides using PM and not backing up that is) ?
 
When partition magic crashed it probably messed up your file table. I've used GetDataBack which seems to work pretty well. Like most free things its not 100% effective, if you don't want to pay for the full version, open all the files individually (yes I know it takes a long t ime so just get the important stuff) with notepad, and then save them and rename the extension to the origonal. You will probably loose alot of data. The last time I had to try and recover a hard drive, I could save maybe 50% of the data on it, granted I don't have professional tools, but you just have to make do. Good luck to ya.
 
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