Partition Magic: restoring lost partitions

Factual Questions
1

I lost my D: partition while attempting to create a dual boot setup using Partition Magic and Boot Magic, and can’t seem to get it back.

Let me explain how this happened. I had a C: and D: drive, both FAT32, and some empty space on the drive. This was set up when I bought the drive (a Maxtor 20GB), using Win98 fdisk etc., not Partition Magic, so the D: drive was a logical drive in an extended Dos partition. I set it up this way about a year ago, with the thought that I would eventually use partition magic to set up a dual boot system. Last month I finally got around to trying it out, and created a hidden primary partition after the D: drive using Partition Magic. I set it as the unhidden partition, and hid the C: partition and installed Win98. I then switched the hidden partitions so that C: was bootable again, and installed Boot Magic. It rebooted straight into Windows, bypassing the Boot Magic menu. I left it that way until this weekend.

This weekend I decided I wanted to get Boot Magic working. I followed the troubleshooting steps on the Power Quest website, still nothing. I thought maybe it was the arrangement of the partitions, so I used PM to rearrange them. First I did it wrong, moving the second bootable drive into the extended dos partition. Oops. Anyway, after several partition move/resize attempts, I finally had what I wanted. A 6GB C: drive, followed by a 2GB hidden primary partition, and then the D: data drive. All worked fine so far, except the D: drive no longer showed as belonging to an extended partition in PM.

I then reinstalled Boot Magic, but the boot menu still didn’t come up. Well, I thought, the next step is Power Quest tech support, so I followed their instructions for running a program to create a debug file. When I tried to run it I got an error message: Error xxxx, EZ Bios enabled, blah blah blah.

At this point, you can imagine a loud forehead smacking sound. I had completely forgotten that this drive was first installed and tested in an older machine that did not support a drive this large, so I had used Maxtor’s EZ Bios software. It was now clear to me why Boot Magic wasn’t working. Well, easy enough. This PC does support large drives, so all I had to do was remove the EZ Bios. I did a quick check of the Maxtor website to see if there were any issues to be concerned with, but they made it sound very straightforward. So I went ahead and did it. Removed the EZ bios, and reinstalled BM. Rebooted, Boot Magic menu comes up, all good. Except there was only the one choice on the boot menu, and my D: drive was gone.

Windows shows the C: drive only, and shows it as the correct 6GB size. PM, however, shows it as being the size of the three former partitions that were set up, except it shows the used data correctly (sort of- it shows the right number, but the graphic for it is about right for what all 3 partitions had). However, when you try to get details on the partition in PM, it shows the correct size.

Sorry this was so long, but I would really like to get back the D: drive and all the data that was on it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

2

I have to ask this because I’ll be attempting the same thing in the near future-- why the ‘hidden’ partition thing?

Was that necessary for the dual boot set-up?

3

Yea, that’s the method recommended by PM for a dual boot setup.

4

One thing you can try is to boot to DOS (Command Prompt Only) on the Windows boot menu and see if the old partition is visible. If you don’t normally see that menu, press F8 as soon as the “Starting Windows 9x” message appears and it’ll show up.

I can’t offer any guarantees but I’ve had instances where partitions totally lost to Windows were still accessible in DOS. What I did in that situation was to use XCOPY to backup the files to another partition, and then wipe the partition. Caveats: in DOS, long file names are lost and XCOPY can take a long time to do a backup – almost 24 hours in my case.

5

I should have mentioned that from within Win98, fdisk shows the partition as a single active primary partition. But when you boot from a 98 floppy, it shows the partition as non-dos. Ugh.

I also tried reinstalling the EZ-bios on the drive, but that hasn’t helped either.

6

There is a shareware program called DiskExplorer that I used to save a partition in much the same way. It will mount the drive, allowing you to drag and drop the data off of it, then repartition and copy it back. Only way I could save that data. You can download it from ZDnet.