Unallotted? Oops

[DysconneX]

Long story short, I needed to use my partitionmagic boot disks to clean up an old drive of mine. The C drive is 20 gigs large, and the D drive is 250 gigs. Fired up Partitionmagic, formatted the 20 gig drive. Swapped it back out for my larger 40 gig and went about my business. Upon rebooting into Windows, I realize that my D drive is no longer showing up in explorer, and in Partitionmagic, it is shown as *unallotted* I did not format or remove the partition on the drive, but now I can't do anything with it. I obviously had a bunch of stuff on that drive, is it all lost?

[glc]

You did something to it - now you need data recovery software. Try PC Inspector first - it's free.

What happened? I don't know, but I can guess at one possibility - your 250 was possibly set up as a dynamic disk? They depend on the other drives in the machine.......which is why I never use them, I always do basic only.

[DysconneX]

Originally Posted by glc What happened? I don't know, but I can guess at one possibility - your 250 was possibly set up as a dynamic disk? They depend on the other drives in the machine.......which is why I never use them, I always do basic only.

You might know better than I do, but to my understanding it was just an NTFS drive. No other partitions. If I recall I used Partitionmagic originally to set it up.

When the partition gets deleted like that, doesn't it just delete the header information, and not the data? When I use this recovery software, will it be able to repair the header? or am I going to have to recover and place all the data I have on another drive somewhere? 200+ gigs of data might get interesting.

[glc]

See if it can find the data first - that will give you more to go on.

[DysconneX]

alright. I haven't formatted the drive or really touched it at all since I noticed stuff was missing. I Downloaded PC Inspector, and it scanned for drives. It found the C drive, and the Fixed Drive #2 with about 230 gigs of data space. Since it doesn't have a drive letter, PC Inspector won't let me do anything with it. Am I doing something wrong? Or should I assign a drive letter to it and then go in?

[glc]

Use find lost drive.

[DysconneX]

k. tried that. On the logical Drive tab it shows Fixed Disk #1 and Windows Drive C. On the Physical Drive tab it shows Fixed Disk #1, Fixed Disk #2, and Windows Drive C. I can search for logical drives on disk #2, but it takes awhile. I'll report my findings in the morning when it finishes.

(that is what I'm supposed to do, right?)

Sorry. I don't mean to be a n00b, I just dont want to mess it up.

[glc]

Search drive 2 for anything it can find.

[DysconneX]

ok. it finished. Claims the drive doesn't have a BootSec. PC Inspector didn't find any files to recover. Despite not having any files to recover, can I try to repair the boot sector and get the files back?

[glc]

Yeah, but I'm not so sure of the best way to try doing that. Maybe someone else here has some ideas.

[DysconneX]

Well. The obvious google search returns various utilities for repair. Guess I'll search the forums for Boot sector repair... seems to be a common ailment.

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.