Recovery tools

I was using Partition Magic to merge two partitions on my hdd. Midway through the process it froze for about 20 minutes, I could not get it to respond at all, so I had to kill the process.

As a result, one of the partitions is no longer formatted for some insane reason. This drive contains everything I need for my life, give or take.

What kind of tools exist for recoverying such data?

Um ... I would have let it do its thing for hours until I was satisfied that it was truly frozen

Wow ... you didn't make a backup then. Before you go screwing with it more, my tip would be considering if it's worth it to send it to a data recovery specialist. And it will cost you. Otherwise, you risk jeopardizing what you have intact even more the more you stab at it. I'd definitely look for something that did a thorough analysis and gave you a report before it acted.

I was simply merging a 5 GB partition and it had been humming along nicely until it just stopped and refused to respond to anything I did....

I was already guessing I might need to take it to an analyst.... where might I go to find one? I've never had to do that before....

besides, why the **** did it do anything to that drive? it was the one being appended to for ****'s sake

B-Con: A bit of a lesson. Before you do ANY partitioning, BACK IT UP

So, you're pouring vinegar into a carafe that already had oil in it and expect the twain to never meet? Sorry, bucko, but you have salad dressing now.

Look up data recovery in the phone book, or online. You could try Spinrite, I've pulled off some miracles with that program in days passed, and plan on buying v 6.0 as soon as I have the extra fundage.

Oh my goodness. You just alluded to making salad dressing while giving advice on computers. I didn't think that would be possible.

Well, it's things like this that are the reason I know what I know: Trial and horrible, horrible error.

This should be shifted to the windows forum if bcon wants a serious set of replies.

I do believe that real answers have already been seriously provided. But yes, you have a point.

There are tools that can help you recover from aborted partition table changes. Although i personally do not think he's going to be able to salvage anything ... its still possible others may know more about which tools to use and how best to go about using them. Personally i think good ol bcon should just have had more patience

Whatever.

I recovered a fraction of it via a recovery tool and restored a good deal of it from backup -- way more than I thought I had. But I had neither the patience nor the resources to seek professional help.

I would have backed it up if I could, but that's the problem with dealing with, say 200-gigs of data, it isn't easy to backup an entire drive whenever you want to do something. The 80 gigs I lost would not have fit on any of my other disks combined I don't think.

But it's irrelevent now. Would a mod please lock this?

you can lock it yourself you know, being the creator fo the thread