partition screwed

[themanwhowas]

hello everybody. i made a boo boo. i was using partition magic to delete my 3rd partition and merge the free space into my primary partition. it is on my primary that my win xp home is installed. the operation was 92 percent complete when it crashed. after rebooting my computer into partition magic again, the primary partition type is now '3C (Hex) PqRP' serial number 'none'. the used size is the same as the total size of the partition. everytime i now try to boot into windows the system restarts over and over. silly me for not making partition magic backup discs. i had to disable roxio go back to use partition magic too. i have a knoppix linux live cd. there is a partition manager on there that says that the primary partition is fine. so i dont think that its been formatted. can i get it back somehow. im posting this on my phone. took about half an hour. help.

[fink]

Have you tried to repair the Master boot record? It may have been corrupted during the crash.

If you have Windows NT / 2000 / XP, you can boot from startup floppy disks or CD-ROM, choose repair option during setup, and run Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run FIXMBR command to fix MBR

http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

[themanwhowas]

i have just tried it. now the computer no longer restarts but it still doesnt boot into windows. im worried that if i re install windows that my partition would still be corrupt and not let me boot. i do not have a windows disk as such. its a windows reload disc as the machine came with windows pre installed. was made by time. pretty slim chance of them sorting this out.

[fink]

Those recovery disks are such a pain. Even if it did work the best you could do would be to get the Operating system back to the state it was in when you bought it... meaning any data or programs you added since then would be gone. If you had a real XP install disk you could install XP over top of itself and try to fix it that way.

Another option would be to use a partition recovery tool from a floppy or this Bootable CD..

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

You would need to get someone to d/l and burn it to a bootable CD for you but there are a number of tools on it that may be of use...

eg- http://www.partition-saving.com/

Which you could use on its own if you want.

[SuperSparks]

Is there an I386 folder on that recovery CD? If there is then it should be possible to do an over-the-top reinstall of Windows.

[themanwhowas]

thanks for trying guys but i am now typing this on my pc. much quicker i tell thee. i reinstalled xp. i had quite a few saved files from the last time my windows corrupted (ahem) so it wasnt too bad. i have now installed norton ghost. i will need it as it wont be long before my windows poo's itself again. i dont suppose there is anyway to recover the files that were lost during the format of my hard drive?

[fink]

You might be able to if they havent' been overwritten..

Here's two that you can try out..

http://www.webattack.com/get/restoration.html

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

The less you use the computer until you try to restore the files the better chance of recovering them.