[sayros]

hope im in the right place here guys. im new to this site. my names josh
im desperate. i used partition magic 8.0 to resize a partition. i thought it froze and pressed the reset button when it was resizing i guess. started it up and my drive wouldnt open. did the windows checkdisk and it went to startup and started indexing a whole pile of things. then it started to restore a whole pile of things. took about a half hour i would say. the drive was about 110 gigs full. now some things are there and what they should be while others say invalid format when opening and others arent what they used to be (ex. audio files playing a different song.) basically it seems like mostly everything is mixed up, fiels don't know what they are or know what they should be. tried some data recovery stuff but it just recovers the files as they are now. i can move the files and they all have the same sizes and such that they had before but they just seem to be mixed up for the most part. some of the files are ok. the only things i desperately need are pictures that are unreplaceable. music, video, games, etc would be nice to get back but not my priority. any ideas would be hugely appreciated. i know i shoulda backed up the valuables but its a shoulda coulda woulda kind of thing now i guess. thanks in advance.

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i guess i forgot to mention what i did after the partition problem. after i reestarted in the middle of it partitioning, i started it up and d: drive was inaccessable. ran wincheckdisk and thats when i had all the indexing and restoring after startup. everything looked good in my d: drive after but i neglected to try and open anything. so i continued on with my resizing of the partition (D: drive) and proceeded to format my C: drive. installed winxp again and then realized that the files on my D: drive were totally messed up. have not done anything since but some feeble attemps with data recovery software that simply get me the file that i can get in D:drive but do not fix the fact that they either say invalid format, play as something else on my drive, or simply do not open (almost seems corrupted.) seems like my files lost there allocation or something. like i said before, every file appears and holds the same size as it did before, they just either don't open as what they should, don't open at all, or, in the case of MS WORD files, open and jibberish computer language. i still have not formatted my D: drive or anything so I know all my data is still on it, it just acts as if it was hit hard on the head and can't remember what goes where and with what. also, when i re-installed winxp, i did it on a 30gb drive i have hooked up as a slave and instead of on one of the 2 partitions i had on my 120 gb drive. this is what i had before the major screw up :

master - 130gb (30 gb partition = c:drive, 80gb partition = d:drive)
slave - 30gb = e:drive

this is what i have now ....

master - 130gb (110gb partition = d:drive, 10gb partition = f:drive)
slave - 30 gb= c:drive
(cd/dvd drive took over e:drive)

one last note, when i installed windows xp again, i deleted the partition on the 'install xp' page that formerly was my c:drive and had windows on it so that i could have my slave (30gb drive) as my c: drive (which was why i was repartitioning in the first place)

i know ive made a mess but i keep faith that because i have not deleted anything off this d:drive where I had about 80gb of data i wanted to save, that someone does know and that there is a way to get my years and years of pictures, music and video (like is said the pictures are the only irreplaceable though.)

thanks and i would be forever indebted to anyone who could help me figure this mess out, shes a big one.

just thought of one other thing, i have no problems with windows xp or booting up or anything, its just that drive d: that only had files on it that is messed up. drive d: never had any programs or anything installed on it. thanks again.

[sayros]

i guess i forgot to mention what i did after the partition problem. after i reestarted in the middle of it partitioning, i started it up and d: drive was inaccessable. ran wincheckdisk and thats when i had all the indexing and restoring after startup. everything looked good in my d: drive after but i neglected to try and open anything. so i continued on with my resizing of the partition (D: drive) and proceeded to format my C: drive. installed winxp again and then realized that the files on my D: drive were totally messed up. have not done anything since but some feeble attemps with data recovery software that simply get me the file that i can get in D:drive but do not fix the fact that they either say invalid format, play as something else on my drive, or simply do not open (almost seems corrupted.) seems like my files lost there allocation or something. like i said before, every file appears and holds the same size as it did before, they just either don't open as what they should, don't open at all, or, in the case of MS WORD files, open and jibberish computer language. i still have not formatted my D: drive or anything so I know all my data is still on it, it just acts as if it was hit hard on the head and can't remember what goes where and with what. also, when i re-installed winxp, i did it on a 30gb drive i have hooked up as a slave and instead of on one of the 2 partitions i had on my 120 gb drive. this is what i had before the major screw up :

master - 130gb (30 gb partition = c:drive, 80gb partition = d:drive)
slave - 30gb = e:drive

this is what i have now ....

master - 130gb (110gb partition = d:drive, 10gb partition = f:drive)
slave - 30 gb= c:drive
(cd/dvd drive took over e:drive)

one last note, when i installed windows xp again, i deleted the partition on the 'install xp' page that formerly was my c:drive and had windows on it so that i could have my slave (30gb drive) as my c: drive (which was why i was repartitioning in the first place)

i know ive made a mess but i keep faith that because i have not deleted anything off this d:drive where I had about 80gb of data i wanted to save, that someone does know and that there is a way to get my years and years of pictures, music and video (like is said the pictures are the only irreplaceable though.)

thanks and i would be forever indebted to anyone who could help me figure this mess out, shes a big one.

just thought of one other thing, i have no problems with windows xp or booting up or anything, its just that drive d: that only had files on it that is messed up. drive d: never had any programs or anything installed on it. thanks again.

[wannabe1]

Hi sayros...

Let me see if I've got this right.

You still have a C: partition and a D: partition.

Windows is installed (and working) on the C: partition.

All of your data is on the D: partition.

I'm not quite understanding this:

master - 130gb (110gb partition = d:drive, 10gb partition = f:drive)
slave - 30 gb= c:drive

How did you end up with the C: partition on the Slave? Was that intentional? It may actually be to our benefit if it is a separate drive...is it?

Open Control Panel and double click on the "System" icon. Under the "Advanced" tab, in the "Startup and Recovery" section, click the "Settings" button. In the window that opens, click on the "Edit" button. In the notepad window that opens (boot.ini), copy/paste the contents here for me and close notepad...don't change anything.

wannabe1

[sayros]

Hi. First of all thanks for helping. Just got off work so I'm here watching the forum intently for any ideas anyone may have for the night.

I did make my slave 30gb drive my C:Drive. I wanted to have windows and my installed programs on a drive of it's own. I also have a 120gb drive that I had an approximately 40gb partition that was formerly my C:drive with Windows installed and an approx. 80gb partition I used just for storing data such as TV Shows, MP3's, personal files .... everything basically.

So it was intentional to have my c: drive as the slave and it is a seperate drive now, but it wasn't when I made this mess up. My C:drive running windows was a partition of my 120gb drive. I was resizing my 80gb data partition when I restarted because I thought it had frozen. Started it up again and it did not recognize my 80gb d:partition. I did a WincheckDisk in Partition magic (and this is when I think things got real messed up) and it started indexing files for like a half hour and then restoring them. When it started up I could go into my D:drive and everything APPEARED fine. What I failed to do though was open any files on that 80gb partition. Did my partition resize again, deleted windows off the small partition I was left with on as my C:drive, made my 30gb hard drive my c:drive, and installed windows on that. Then I realized my files on D:drive were totally messed up. Audio files played different songs than they were, video files played parts of a video then a part of another and a part of another, images said invalid format. It seems to me that when that indexing and restoring took place, it plunked the data of those files in completely random shells and I was left with data completely scattered throughout files. A few files here and there are fine and I figure those are the ones that were moved before I restarted while it was partitioning.

To answer your other questions ... I have c: d: and f: drives now.

Windows is installed and working fine on my 30gb slave hard drive that has no partitions on it.

The data that is completely messed up is on my approx 110gb partition. (It used to be 80gb but i extended it to 110gb as stated in the long paragraph above)

I also have a small f:partiton of approx 10gb that was my c:drive and had windows on it when the partition disaster happened. There's nothing on it now.

Info you requested:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

All help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Josh