I recenlty did a reinstall of Windows XP on physical drive 0. I did a format of C, and reinstlled the O/S from scratch. Everything appeared to go fine. I was up and running in no time. I noticed a problem though soon after install. When I went into "My Computer", I noticed 3 of my logical partitions were no longer visible. They were all there prior to the O/S reinstall, but I did not do ANYTHING to these partitions. I started to panic, as I do not regularly back up my files on these drives, yet I have recently placed VERY IMPORTANT files on each of them!!! During my panic, I d/l several shareware utilities to try and see if I can recover my partitions. One of them was Active@ Partition Recovery available at
www.ntfs.com. This utility boots up from a floppy and directly accesses the drive. When the app started low and behold I could SEE my three missing partitions, with the correct drive letters and everything. I was even able to VIEW the contents of these partitions, and all of my files appear to be there! However, when I boot into windows they are no longer there!!! In XP, I looked at disk management and noticed it says 30GB of FREE SPACE!! This 30 GB free space should actually by one 20GB partition, and two 5GB partitions(my missing partitions). Partition magic WINDOWS interface shows similar results. I see 30GB of unallocated space. BUT.....when I boot up using the Partition Magic rescue disks, I SEE my partitions!! How come I can see them when I boot a utility from floppy, but Windows wont see them?? Is it possible that when I boot from floppy, a different MBR is being referenced compared to the one used to boot into Windows?? Please, any help greatly appreciated!!!!!