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Weird partition juggling problems, help appreciated...

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Mysphyt

Member
Joined
Apr 12, 2002
Location
Elsewhere
I've kind of painted myself into a corner here, and I could use some help figuring out how to get out of this situation. I'm placing this in this forum because it's Windows that has the problem, but mods, if you think it'd do better somewhere else, feel free to move it.

Okay, background. Disk 1 has one partition on it. It was supposed to be FAT32, but somehow ended up ext2. There's data I need on there. Disk 2 has 2 NTFS partitions on there. Partition 1 (C:) is my XP install. Partition 2 (D:) has a bunch of data I need on it.

Since I needed stuff on the ext2 partition, and I just formatted the drive with my linux install on it, I wanted to shrink D: and make a small FAT32 partition that I could move the data on to with Knoppix or similar. Used PartitionMagic Pro, which errored out in the middle of the procedure. Now, Windows can't recognize D:. It's as though it isn't there at all. PartitionMagic under Windows can see the partition, but Windows itself can't.

Oddly, though, I can still mount D: and access the data under linux. Since there's no write support for NTFS, I can't transfer the data that way, and since the other partition is ext2, I can't get at any data I write there from windows. Plus, the drive that's ext2 formatted doesn't have enough space to hold all the data I need to pack up.

The ideal solution here would be to get Windows recognizing D: again. Any ideas on what I can do to get it doing so? I can't chkdsk it, because it doesn't think the drive exists. I've got a third drive that I could put in and use as a shuttle, if necessary, but I'd like to avoid that, because mostly what I need the data on the ext2 partition for is to be a backup of the third drive. If I format the third drive and then still lose the ext2 data, I'm hosed. Plus, it'd be kind of like doing a Towers of Hanoi puzzle with my data, which would be a hassle of immense proportions. Is there anything I haven't considered? Any ideas I'm not wise enough to come up with? Like I said, ideally, I'd like to get D: recognized again, but any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. :)
 
I think the partition table got screwed up, can't you undo it with PM? (I asume PM made a backup of the partition table and/or MBR/MFT).

There are a few programs that may work:
Partition Table Doctor.
MBRtool (Free), DiskPatch.
Active@ Partition Recovery.
GetDataBack, DiskExplorer.

You could also use NTFS reader (Free) to copy the files to a FAT12/16/32 drive.

For most programs you'll need DOS, most likely a bootdisk will do.

You could also try the fixmbr command from the recovery console, but I doubt it'll help.
 
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