Help!! Partition Magic 8 lost my files

[kyu614]

I used PM 8 to merge two of my partitions, D and E, neither of them primary. It asked me to select a folder on D to save the files from E to which i did. However, at the end the files were not moved and the E drive was not even formatted.

Has anyone had this problem? Is there anyway i can get my files back? Thanks in advance

 

[RalfHutter]

Partition Magic is known by the HDD companies as "Partition Tragic" for a valid reason. You should have backed up your data first as recommended in the PM documentation.

That being said, your data is probably still there, you're just going to have to jump through a few hoops or lay out some cash to get it. There's various software data recovery apps like "Getdataback" and others (search the forums) and there's also the (hideously expensive) data recovery services. Either will most likely work but in the meantime DO NOT USE THAT DRIVE!!! You do not want to take the chance of overwriting the data that's already there. Decide on your recovery solution before you use that drive again.

 

[kyu614]

thanks for replying. drive E is now shown as an unformatted, will data recovery programs still be able to get my files back?

 

[ElfHeart]

the data should still be there, as far as will a program recover the information ... it should be possible since the file system's allocation table (FAT or FAT32) or the master file table (MFT, used on NTFS partitions) was likely just removed but the data not have been removed. i had a problem a bit like yours recently (not from PM though, just the info on the partitions for my GB60 went screwy and i could not access anything). i tried a few different programs for data recovery, my two favorites were

ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery)
and Restorer2000

i got most of the info back using Restorer2000, it was a fairly simple program to use and did a good job of data recovery. you should be able to find the url's for either with google. the demo draw backs of the programs are

ZAR - you can only recover 4 folders at a time
Restorer2000 - can only recover files under 64kb in size


hopefully this will help some

Elf

 

[kyu614]

Thanks for the info elfheart. I was able to get a lot of my files back using ZAR. I would have tried Restorer2000, but the files i need are larger than 64kb.
Thank you both for you help.

 

[ElfHeart]

Glad to hear you could get alot of your files back