Help New User - Recovery of files on lost partition

[Naeem Dean]

Sorry about this, but I have just bought the s/w and need some help.

Due to a power failure during partition resize using Partition Magic8, I lost all sight of my H: Drive Photographic partiton containing about 30gb of data in WinXP. PM8 could see the space but the only option it gave me was to reformat the partiton, thus losing any hope of recovery of the files (mainly jpeg, mpeg and some avi files)

I eventually downloaded Partition Recovery and got the drive visible in WinXP again, but couldn't see any files.

After looking at several progs for the File Recovery, I downloaded the "Recover My files" demo in the hope that I could rescue some of my files. He presto, it took some 9 hours to eventually show me a some 15000 files it could rescue. I purchased the product last night and elected to save the files to a different partition (f where I made about 35gb of space (ie heeding your warning not to write to the same partition).

Looking at the situation this morning, having left it overnight to recover the files, I found that the partition and and hard drive are unstable due to a "different drive geometry" and I have now had to reformat the f: drive. windows explorer and my computer could not open a folder called lost files, and simply froze each time a rebooted and tried to see what had been recovered.

Has anyone got any bright ideas as to what might have happened??

I really thought that the program would simply restore the files, with their original names in the alternate partition.

I am increasingly begining to think that the purchase has been both a waste of time AND expense.

I hope someone can help please?

Regards from sunny Manchester, home of the biggest Football club in the world!

[GDH]

Are the partitions you are talking about located on the same physical disk? You should be saving files to a different physical disk (so as not to overwrite any recoverable files on the the "bad" disk).

If you can still see the problem drive as a partiton, run a "Complete Search" of the logical drive for specific photo types. You will be able to tell very quickly if it is finding your photos. Make sure you click on them in Recover My Files and can preview the photos in the preview window. If you see them then they can be saved.

If it turns out that you can no longer see the problem drive as a drive letter, then click on "manually set options" and go to the Advanced Tab and put a tick in the box for "allow searching of physical drives". Then run a Complete Search on the physical drive.

I hope this helps your data recovery attempts.