HDD Partition gone south...

[wamderlust]

I recently made the stupid attempt to use 'Symantec's partition magic' to partition my main hard drive(C) for a separate OS. Well, when the PC restarted it kept saying that the wrong disk was inserted, to replace it and restart. I did not have any disk inserted, and I think that it is attempting to boot from the new partition, which does not have any OS on it yet. Many attempts to boot off (D; recovery partition) failed. I then attempted to do a recovery (with back-up) off the operating system disk, which resulted in the machine to do a recovery every time it restarts now, without ever going through to windows. I can't even seem to start in safe mode (F8 nor shift). Please don't tell me I have to do a destructive recovery and reformat my hard drive. I have about 150gigs of memories (pics etc.) and programs (most w/o backup) on there. Can you think of anything I could do, or am doing wrong for that matter. I believe that the system just does not recognize what letter drive to boot from(??), is there anything I can change in the BIOS Settings?
Thanks
Chris

My System Specs: Processor AMD Athlon™ 64 4200+ dual core processor 2 x 512KB L2 cache | 2.20GHz | 2000MHz system bus Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 Ru2 Chipset NVIDIA® nForce® 410 Memory 2048MB DDR (4 x 512MB), 400Mhz, dual channel Video NVIDIA® GeForce® 6100 GPU 128MB shared video memory TV Tuner ATI Theater™ 550 pro TV tuner (with 3D comb) Audio 6-channel (5.1) AC’97 audio Hard Drive 320GB (7200 RPM, 2MB cache)

 

[lukeyu]

attach the hard disk to anthoer good computer and use data recovery software to recover files.

I suggest you use data recovery software such as EASEUS DataRecoveryWizard to recover files.

Download demo version: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

You can use "AdvancedRecovery" to scan your corrupted hard drive. After the scan is complete, the lost file will be displayed in DataRecoveryWizard, you can select them and recover them.

 

[Samstoned]

and as 2nd option go to this website
save a lot of time and grief
M7L.com
the best Data recovery softs out there is file scavenger and O&O recovery
I don't think you need file recovery I think the system got screwed up need a boot disc to fix
if you can have somewone run acronis and make boot repair disc it will get your original partion setup back
paragon another good one
free linux tool called backtrack look it up

 

[wamderlust]

thanks samstoned

I used the trial version of acronis disc director, and a bootable disk showed me what was wrong, the new partition I had made changed drive letters and hid my OS partition. now I just need to get my hands on the retail version, the demo version did not allow to make changes. thanks for your help, I believe this will work!

 

[wamderlust]

cool

done..got my hand on a retail version of acronis disk director... :evil: ....deleted the partition I had made, resized C, renamed C and D to orig config...pc is reinstalling OS as we speak, all my old data is saved in backup..thanks for the help!!! :haha: :bounce: :haha:

 

[wamderlust]

one question left....

After having to do the recovery with backup, I now have the oem version of windows, including the 'My Backup' folder, which was of course created during the recovery. It seems that everything in this folder is what I originaly had in my 'C' drive/partition. Now, the question is, can I replace everything in 'C' with this data, or can I only pick out the data like pictures, music, install files. Or, can I repleace the whole enchilada and have everything back to the way it was before I had to recover?
Thanks for any help!