ntfs problem

hi folks,

xp version: pro

serious problem here
while attempting to add a new partition (dvd temp partition) with partition magic 7 to my system it stopped around 77% while resizing my main windows partition to make room and i was forced to make a cold restart, after which my system wouldn't boot into xp.

after searching the microsoft support site for the stop error code it gave me when i tried to boot up i concluded it was an ntfs problem and followed the troubleshooting guide on the site, i put the disk into another system running xp as a slave and checked the drive out as the system booted up.

as it checked the disk it "fixed" minor errors in the files, basically the entire file structure is still there but is out of sync with the data on the disk, some files are fine, the rest either contain data from other files or won't open/run.

this is also the case with my documents disk (which i attempted to add the dvd temp partition first) so a lot of the files are in the same boat as the files on the windows disk.

does anybody know of any utility i can use to analyse the disks and attempt to restore my system and documents?

any help would be greatly appreciated.


cheers,
Robert

Well, first off, you're not going to get any better performance by adding a seperate partition for what it sounds like you want to do. You're only giving yourself a way of organizing it.

That said, you should never do anything like that without making a full backup of everything.... Lesson learned I guess... Don't worry.... I did it to myself a few years ago.... So I feel your pain....

First off, you can always try booting off of the Partition Magic disks and seeing what they say. I would be very hesitant to do anything other than fixing it if it says that is possible.

The only other option I know of is somewhere like http://www.ontrack.com/ . They have software that will restore files that have been deleted and partitions that have been destroyed. You may be able to get some of it back if the partition isn't totally toast.

You also may want to put your hard drive in another PC that has XP or 2000 on it and see if you can see your data.

Good Luck!!!

hi flachebaq,

when i put the disks into the other system it allowed me to see the contents of what the filesystem thought was on the disk, it just wouldn't open a number of the files and if it did they'd have the wrong contents

Here is some good freeware file recovery software, there's nothing to lose by trying it:

PC Inspector

I would advise you to back up all the recoverable files first before you try anything else though. Also, you really should be using PM8 with Win XP, there was a subtle change made to NTFS in XP which PM8 addresses - that may well be why PM7 hung like that.