Opps. Windows XP thinks hard drive is bigger then it is??

[taltos1]

Hello,
I have a 80GB hard drive that was working fine and I started up Partion Magic and it thought that I had an additional 40 GB that was unpartioned. So it thought it was a total of 120GB. Wel, l I used the program to resize it and lo and behold I cannot access it anymore, I get that the file" is corrupt or unreadable" and when I try to check it in Partion Magic I get "Cluster beyond end" error. I took out the hard drive and I know it is actually an 80GB drive. What can I do now as I have data that I do not want to lose on it..

Thanks a lot

 

[DetroitSportsFan]

I may be wrong on this so don't take only my word here .... get some other points of view also.

Its quite likely to fix the problem, you'll need to reformat the corrupted partition.

IF I am wrong .... and someone has a better solution, then wonderful. I'd hate to lose all my years of data I've accumulated. It would be next to devestating to me. So, in this case, if I am wrong ..... GOOD!

I've had excellent success with Partition magic .... but I've also had a few catastrophies. Its a great program, but its not fail proof. Its always recommended to have a back up of important stuff for this and other reasons. We all know that .... but we don't always do it. Unfortunately, it never feels good to be reminded of it after something terrible happens. If it makes you feel any better, I've made plenty of painful mistakes in my 20+ years of attending the school of hard knocks for computing.

 

[taltos1]

I want to be able to save some data on it before I reformat? Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[shilala]

Get another hard drive (format and install OS), set your corrupted drive as the slave, and use a recovery tool to move your data to the new hard drive using getdataback or some other recovery tool.
You can then reformat the old drive and use it for extra storage.
Throw partition magic away, it sucks IMHO.

 

[DetroitSportsFan]

Where is this data you want to save? On the new and corrupt partition? If its readable, try transfering it to the partition that Windows recognizes correctly.

This may be a long shot .... but can you remove that new partition, reversing the process that created the problem?

I'm hesitent to say a whole lot because I'm not overly familiar with your kind of problem. However, I'd like to help .... and since no one else seemingly wants to offer suggestions, I feel compelled to. Maybe someone like mechBgon might see this post and have some valuable input. In my eyes, he's one of the more knowledgeable posters here. I'd respect his opinion!

 

[taltos1]

Thanks guys, what do you suggest for data recovery? The hard drive in question is not the boot drive by the way.
Thanks