Partition Magic disaster

[Catt]

Hi,

I really hope someone can help me here I've turned my computer into a 20lb paperweight. Now I'd just deal with it and reformat had I not been a complete tool and didn't backup all my files to cd.

This is what happened, I had 4 partitions on my harddrive and had decided to merge them as I was running out of room on the main partition so I installed Partition Magic 7.0 Pro and chose to merge the first two adjacent partitions C and D. I ran it and as it was finishing up I saw some errors flash by but it went too fast for me to get the numbers, I assumed that some of the files had been corrupted during the merge and wasn't too worried. The system went into automatic reboot and during the boot screens after it checked the PCI device listing I got this:

A disk read error occurred
Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart

So I did but I just get the error again, this is when the faint stirrings of panic begin to set in but I have followed the directions and created the disks Partition Magic asked me to make just in case of emergency so I take a deep breath and boot from the bootable disk they had me make and run the other disk that has a limited version of the program on it. Unfortunately all it tells me is that I have partition table error #113 and the only operation it offers me to perform is format... only wait... I don't want to lose everything!

Now I'm panicking. I do a little more looking around, run my XP disk but I'm not well enough versed in DOS to really know what to do there to rescue the files and while I'm poking around I see that XP says I have a partition C that is about half the harddrive and the rest is unpartitioned space... I figure that can't be right since I had 4 partitions and I only attempted to merge 2 of them so there should at least be 2 left and then maybe the rest is unpartitioned cause the merge didn't work. So I boot from a 98 boot disk and there it is again... 1 partition and the rest is unpartitioned space - half the drive is unpartioned and half is so it seems the other 2 partitions E and F have somehow merged.

Please please please tell me there is something I can do to rescue the information... I've done nothing as of yet - thought about installing XP on the C drive (the only existing partition) but I'm thinking that it might be the space holding the majority of my files which were on E and I don't want to do anything without getting some advice first. If there's anything I can do about this, any way to retrieve the information... or better yet fix the error and not have to reformat (not likely I know but I can dream can't I?) any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Cat

[pip22]

Your safest bet is to install another disk and put XP on it, then when it's running have a look at your other disk in Explorer and see what's on it. There's a prog called 'Paragon Partition Undelete' which may help, but you absolutely should not install or do anything else with existing disk (other than making it a slave when you fit a new master) if you want the best chance of recovering what's on it. Even try to borrow a hard disk just to put XP on temporarily if you can't afford to buy one.