Resized Drive - recovering data?!?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi all
Ok, here goes...my older bro tried to resize his primary partition (I believe with partition magic) so he could whack Linux onto a new partition. From what he's told me his drive was 40gig and he tried to resize it to 36gig so he could have 4 gig for linux. Anyway, partition mac was doing ts thing but as it was nearing completion he got a critical error message and the pc crashed.
He tried re-booting but cannot. I need to point out here that he lives about 250 miles away so I'm only going on what he has told me. Is there any way he can sort this out? He never made a back up disc (oops) but is there any way he can undo what he did so he can (at least) back up his data. If he could get the data back he could then do a clean OS install. I only have a limited amount of DOS knowledge but if there is anyone out there who knows how we could access the data to back up would appreciate it!
Thanks
Steve

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

He could put his hard disk in another machine and see if his old files are accessible. If he can see them through another o/s then he may be able to recover them.

I wouldn't like to say if he would be able to repair the o/s. Partition magic may well have written over part of the operating system or buggered something critical up.

I would suggest trying to recover the data first and then maybe try repairing the o/s or maybe get hold of a data recovery utility.

 

Hm - which Windows? Which filesystem? And which version of PM?

DOS knowledge will only work if it is a FAT32 partition.

I note that this is only just above one of the classic 'boundary problem' sizes of 32GB, which makes me *suspect* some fairly old stuff.

It would be nice to know what the critical error message said!

Harry.

 

Hi
I'll try and get more info if I can.
OS was XP Home and best guess would be NTFS file system.
His data should still be on the drive right?
If he could get into DOS would he not be able to search and if he found data, could he not copy?

 

If it was NTFS then DOS will not read that at all.

Best simple way is to do what stoney suggested and mount the drive as a data drive on another machine.

Harry.

 

Oops. That's the reason why you should always do a backup before messing with your partitions.

There are disk recovery apps that can attempt to restore your data. Not sure how successful they are.

 

I would mount the drive in another computer as said above, and then use some recovery software. Ive had the most success in the past with getdataback, its never let me down.