OMG, my partition disappeared!!!! HELP

I have a 1TB SATA drive, and I split it into 2 partitions. One partition is my D drive, and I assigned the other drive the letter Z. Within the last few days I transferred all of my DVD backups to the Z drive from the D drive. Suddenly the Z drive isnt showing up in the computer explorer. I dont know if this has anything to do with installing Partition Magic Pro 8.0, but when I installed it, I did not modify the Z drive at all. When I open Partition Magic Pro it does show the Z drive partition, but it no longer has a letter assigned to it. Can you please help me fix this so that I can recover all of my DVD backups? Tell me what you need to know and I can provide it for you....I just desperately need those backups of my DVD collection.

Here is a screenshot of the Microsoft **** management console so you can see what I am talking about.

the above shows . . .
Disk 0 is a 1TB type of drive , with 2 partitions, a big 732G 1/2 filled first one called Internal.
and some unknown partition of 200G

so your saying that you had assigned the letter Z to the 200G second partition on Disk 0 ? right?
this partition was accessable in the operating system, because you copied your data to it.

and now the partition is SHOWN , but it is no longer recognised by the operating system.

and when you go back into the partitioning program, that has the ability to hide partitions, and make and convert partitions that are not recognised by the operating system, what does it say that partition is?

letters themselves are assigned in an NT type system, so a letter not being assigned is not a big deal, but it not being recognised as a specific file system, or partition type is. get the "properties" of that particular partition in the program that made or altered it, if you can.

What is the Model of the drive, specifically the whole Model name ?
.

if it is the one that says 199.09 GB then simply right click on it and click change drive letter, pick a drive letter and it should show up in you "my computer"

The name of the drive in the device manager is:WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0 ATA device, and its a Western Digital Caviar 1TB SATA drive.

Medo....I tried that, but every time I tried to change the drive letter I recieved this error message:



I refreshed and rebooted like it said, but to no avail.

when you ran partition magic, apon the program starting up even, did it tell you something was Wrong, and ask you to fix it?
been there done that never again. way back even i had a huge raid0 array and PM would whine that the partion table was wrong, and it was a gonna Feex it. well after that i still ran PM, i just ignored that.

Here is a link
http://social.answers.microsoft.com...e/thread/42b1ebc3-edaf-4c3f-93cd-beda4bab2671
in one quick paragraph i get:
happened when they messed with winders7 parition in PM often
IS accessable via other systems that will read NTFS drives from outside the system
Can be possibly fixed by converting Back and Forth :-( which you could toast all your data.
there are dangerous methods suggested, so a backup might be very usefull.

i would wonder if a simple MBR repair wouldnt fix it right up, but again ya supposed to have a backup before messing with such things.

i am getting pretty good results with a new partitioning program called "partition Master" which is Baitware, it will do a lot of stuff for free, enough to get by on, and replace PM. and it copes with Massive sized disks much better than PM.

since i you are already using partition magic, does it still come with the drive letter changer thing, you could try that. i got screwed once using partition magic and since then never again. gparted is simple, no install necessary and works every time.

Partition Magic doesnt even show the partition....it lists the drive as the full 1TB, and it says the drive is bad. I dont believe the drive is bad, but I do believe Partition Magic did something to the partition that I cant find anymore

EDIT: Partition Wizard fixed the problem and I was able to recover the partition and all of the data stored on it! Your my hero!!!

well the most possiblities were there in that MS link

I would, run the OS disk checking utility on the partition that is there, the dskchk IS capable of checking the partition tables.
then i would just nuke the last partition to unallocated , then remake it in W7 disk manager, and move the data back over to it again.
If i no longer had the data that was on that partition, then i would freak out and try to run an unformat on it, then a restore. then i would still have to nuke it and remake it so it didnt happen again.

and i would be so paranoid at this point, that i would in-so-much-as run off to the local computer store and plunk down $100 for another drive, and get my 350GIGs of data on one more drive. or pipe it over to the other computer or something.

First. DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING TO THE DRIVE! This includes changes trying to fix it.

Attach an external drive to recover files onto and use a recovery program to get the data off. I prefer R-Studio, but there are many other options, including freeware. In freeware, PC Inspector sometimes works. I am not sure about others since I use a paid product.

Once you have the data, then attempt to fix it.

Hey how did u fix it with partion wizard?????????????????

HeatM1ser2k4 said:

Partition Magic doesnt even show the partition....it lists the drive as the full 1TB, and it says the drive is bad. I dont believe the drive is bad, but I do believe Partition Magic did something to the partition that I cant find anymore

EDIT: Partition Wizard fixed the problem and I was able to recover the partition and all of the data stored on it! Your my hero!!!

Click to expand...

hamza said:

Hey how did u fix it with partion wizard?????????????????

Click to expand...

I forget, but it was super easy. It recognized the partition and that the partition wan't active...and I think I just right-clicked on that partition to bring up a menu that let me select the option to activate the partition. After that, I simply changed all of the partitions letter's and put them back in their old order....but I honestly forget...I just remember that it was really easy and I lost no data.

But how did you do it? what was the procedure please help i have some important data on that partition! Thanks would realy appreciate your help thanks

Have you tried to run partition wizard yet? Start there, try to do what heatmiser said, and let us know if you have questions.

hamza said:

But how did you do it? what was the procedure please help i have some important data on that partition! Thanks would realy appreciate your help thanks

Click to expand...

It should show all of the partitions on your drive(s) when you start the app. You'll see the active partitions and also the inactive partitions. Simply right-click on the inactive partition and make it active. I believe you'll be prompted to restart your computer...and thats about all you have to do....your data is still on that partition...its just that the partition isnt active...so you wont lose anything...you just cant access it while the partition is inactive.