Partition Lost after unsucessful merge attempt

[RickiusMaximus]

Hi all,

I have a 160gb SATA drive, it was split into two partitions- a 8gb one for the operating system and a 140gb one for the files.

I was running partition magic 8 and attempted to merge the two partitions together.

The operation however failed half way though and now the 8gb partition is unbootable (and does not contain the merged data) and the 140gb one is gone.

I stuck in a second hard drive to inspect the main one and I am able to see the drive and the primary partition using partition magic 8 and even read the contents (however it does not show up in my computer as a drive)

I have attempted to use partition magic's 'undelete partition' to try and recover the second large partition but it cannot find anything.

Here is a screenshot of the display in partition magic-

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...itionmagic.jpg

You can see the primary partition on the drive (drive 2) aswell as the size of the second partition as it was set as extended.


I have some recovery programs which I can use to hopefully recover the data but in order to do that do I need to blank and repartition the drive so it can be selected?

I would prefair if I could restore the partition as I dont wish to manually copy all that data to another source (theres over 100gb of it) but if this is the only solution then its better than nothing.

Many thanks in advance...

[GDH]

I suggest you DONT "blank and repartition the drive". This has the ******ial to make things worse.

Download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com or click on this link: http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe.

I suggest you first try a "Fast Format Recover". In the drive selection screen, select the "physical drive" (you booting drive is drive 0 so your scondary drive should be physical drive 1 - but you will be able to tell from the size).

If the Fast Format Recover does not work, next try a Complete Format Recover searching only for the default selected files types.

In the results screen, look both in File View and Folder View for your files. In folder view at the end of the search you should get all files listed (not just those selected) with full file and folder names.

Click on the files in the results screen to preview their content, and if you like what you see, purchase an activation key to save files to your other drive.

You could search the net for a drive recovery tool that tries to fix the partitions in place - but if it does not work you can easily make things much worse and greatly reduce the chance of future recovery. If it is valuable datat then using a recovery tool to save to another drive is the best option.