Partition woes - PM8 saying partition table is bad, WinXP wants to format the partitons :(

[Confused]

Hi all.

I left my Partition Magic 8 disks at home when I went to look at a computer for someone, and needed to move a partition, so used another program. It went through and did a surface scan of the disk, which took longer than the time i had available. It moved the partition, but at the options after doing it the computer was turned off...he thought i said "If in doubt, turn it off", when I actually said "if in doubt, leave it on and i'll sort it out tomorrow"

Anyway, I took my PM8 disks with me yesterday, and booted it up with that to check it had done it, and it seemed to be OK. I then created a new, primary, active partition, and set the old partition, which used to be the boot partition, as non-active. I then installed Windows XP, which went on OK.

Going to look at the partition I moved (was the old, corrupted, WinMe installation with all their documents on...they had a CDRW drive, but had no backups of anything

) from Windows XP, it said "Drive is not formatted, format now?". Which obviously I didn't want to do!

So I rebooted into PM8, and it said that the partition table was bad for the drive, and it wouldn't show anything from the drive.


Would doing a fdisk /mbr be what I need to fix it, or should I see if i can dig out a hard drive of my own to Ghost the partition onto and see if it can be recognised?

Obviously, losing the data is not an option (if it were my PC, i probably would have sucked it up and wiped the whole disk, but the guy is a doctor and has a few important documents there ) so I need some way to get Windows to be able to read it, without wanting to format the partition?


Any help will be GREATLY appreciated, as this has me stumped


Garry

 

[Nothinman]

Would doing a fdisk /mbr be what I need to fix it, or should I see if i can dig out a hard drive of my own to Ghost the partition onto and see if it can be recognised?

That won't do anything, all that does is rewrite the Master Boot Record which is seperate from the partition table.

I would pop in a Linux disk and see if it can read the partition, and if it can't atleast you'll get a worthwhile error message.

 

[sakic19]

But is it not true that the mbr contains some kind of info (pointers to size, location) of the partition table? So (forgive my ignorance, nothinman) wouldn't running fdisk /mbr fix it?
Have you tried doing chkdsk off a boot disk (assuming you can switch to the partition from the prompt)?
But if all else fails, like nothinman said try a linux disk (knoppix maybe).

 

[Nothinman]

But is it not true that the mbr contains some kind of info (pointers to size, location) of the partition table?

That's right, it's not true that the MBR contains anything about the partiton table. The partition table is in a fixed location on every drive.

 

[adlep]

Do you still needs some help?
I think that I know the right program, which might restore, repair the partition.
Do not trust the PM8. It is a bad program....
Something similar happened to my buddy and I was able to help him out.
He has lost an entire Fat32 partition. Using the program I was able to repair/restore everything....
In spite the fact that PM just labeled the partition as bad
Link
This program is excellent!
They have many usefull tools
But you have to be very carefull.
Read the user guide first
Just by looking at the guide, you can tell that this is an excellent program written by some dedicated, knowledgeable person.
LMK,