Partition recovery

deveraux

Senior member
Mar 21, 2004
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I was altering my primary HDD (which holds the installations -- games/XP) such that I would have a free partition space to potentially install either Win98SE/ME for some backward compatibility with old software that does not work well in XP.

I lost most of my old partitioning software when I moved recently so I was using some unfamiliar software. Anyway, while tinkering around, my secondary HDD, which contains a lot of data -- i.e. some source codes, photos and other documents somehow had its partition corrupted.

The data itself is still there as for some reason, there isn't an issue accessing while in DOS mode. I would have just copied the files over to a spare HDD except that I have none. If there are no other solutions then I'll just go out and buy one, but I was hoping for a way to just fix the partition itself.

I have tried using TestDisk to fix the boot sectors and alter the partition type but no matter what I do, Win XP still fails to recognise the partitions on my secondary HDD. Everything works great from the primary however (which I find rather ironic). When I view the directory/file structure from TestDisk, I can also verify that all the files seem to still be there.

Any suggestions on how I can get Windows to read the partition?

EDIT: Never mind, I managed to restore the drive. To anyone interested or experiencing the same problem, turns out it was just the partition type that wasn't altered correctly when I did it in Windows but was altered correctly when done from boot.