Oh no. Here's my predicament. I got partition magic 8 in order to clean up my hard drives. I have 3. Each had 2 partitions on them, for various reasons in the past. I now don't need them all partitioned off, so I used the merge partition function. Just to make sure, I did it on my 2, less important drives and they merged beautifully. On my 3rd drive, which is 120, 15 is my OS partition and the rest is my BACKUP HD. I'm a graphic designer, so I have a lot of files to back up. That's also where I put my most important stuff since its the newest and best quality HDD, and I can't exactly put 105 Gigs on Cds or Dvds. Anyways, thinking I would organize things a bit, I merged the 2. Partition Magic did its thing, restarted the computer and said it was moving files, etc. I left since it was taking hours and when I came back, my comp had already restarted. What I found was only 1 partition where the 2 were before, but it was only 15G, like it was before. The rest was missing! I loaded up partition magic, and it said that sure enough there was 105G unallocated on that drive, and that because of some error, it had not completed the operation. The problem is it says there is 105G of free space... What does this mean it just erased everything????! What can I do with this? Is my data still there? I know I should have backed up, but the program said that its unlikely it would damage data, let alone erase an entire Hard Drive, and I can't exactly back up 105G easily. Somebody please help! If this is gone, I have nothing left... Has this ever happened to anyone? Is there a way to get the data back? I tried system restore but it did nothing. The HD changes were permanent. I don't want to make a partition in the unallocated space since that is where all my data should be! I thought I would ask before doing anything. Sorry if I sound desperate... I am. Please help.
Hi, first, if that 105gig partition was for backups, it would be a bad idea merging it with the Win XP partition, because then if Windows XP failed and you needed to restore, you would loose all that anyway so it would of been best just to keep it, but anyway its done now, and there is a way to retrive all your data just as long as oyu havent touched that 105gb unalocated space. Use a program called Recover My Files or Easy Recovery, they will need to be purchased, but if you feel you NEED all the data back, it may be the best way to go, i tried these applications once, they seem to recover all the data, well most, but its all disorganised and mixed up, this is bad if you have applications on that drive, if its all images or things like Flash or Photoshop files then it shouldent be a program The Data on the HDD hasent actually been fully deleted, its all still there in a way that can be recovered, it only gets deleted when the HDD writes other data to that area of the HDD. Recover My Files Ontrack Easy Recovery Hope that helps
Okay, don't panic and don't touch your computer yet. The more you use the computer, the more information gets written to the hard drive, the bigger chance it will write over your deleted data. Now I was in a similar situation a few weeks ago. I accidently deleted the partition on my landlord's USB drive (lol, n00b moment). It contained all his important billing and housing spreadsheets. Anyways, I managed to retrieve almost all of the documents by using a free program called PC Inspector File Recovery. Although as I type this, I realize that you might have saved you artwork in formats other then BMP and GIF? Photoshop and GIMP files may be a little harder to recover
But nothing gets written to Unallocated space and i never have had problems retrieving Photoshop files.
Okay, thank you for replying! I am going to try the free one, since I'm still in college and poor. I know I shouldn't have touched it, but was rearranging things to switch my important stuff to my external. Anyways, it's a long story why I was merging, and I probably should have just left well enough alone and gotten a usb key or something. Anyways, I'll try it out and let you know.
Okay, everything is working out great. I have been experimenting with different recovering programs (went with Recovermyfiles--the free one hardly ran on my computer). I just recovered my first batch of files. There were all there, however I can't open them in any program. For instance, a jpg in windows picture viewer says "No preview available." I can't open it in photoshop or any other image editing program either (says "invalid format"). The same goes for all my other files types--photoshop, flash, etc. Their file size seems right so it seems that all the information is there. It seems like they're corrupt though. Is there something I can do to be able to read these files now that I have them? Some extra program I'll need to get? I really appreciate all the help.
