Question : Problem: Changed my partition table, now it is corrupted.

Right I am having a major freak out here. Yesterday I cloned my "My Documents" Drive (160GB) to my new 640GB Drive as I has run out of space. I used Acronis Echo. Now this worked a charm and I had it all set up perfectly.

Only thing was my 160GB drive had a hidden 5GB EISA partition for recovery. So when I cloned my drive, it was now 21GB on my 640GB drive.

I wanted to get rid of this so I used the tool "PTEDIT32" to change the partition settings to NTFS and then formatted. Now this worked too. I now had a blank 21GB NTFS parition.

What I then wanted to do was merge the two partitions so It was just one large new "My Documents" Drive.

This is where it all went wrong.

Using PTEDIT32 I changed some of the partition table entries.

This completely messed it up.

My partitions in Disk Management are wrong. They appear one size but are another, and my two partitions have swapped location on the hard disk.

Now in fact, nothing on the disk has changed. Apart from the partition table. Because it is corrupt, windows can not read it properly so it spews out rubbish so it can read it.

I need to recreate my partition table.

I have tried "Partition Table Doctor" But it doesn't run on vista.
I have tried "Disk Internals Partition Recovery" But it doesn't fix my problem.
I have tried "Acronis Disk Director" But that doesn't fix it either.

I am now trying "FinalData". Right now It actually seems to be finding my files on my drive. It is doing a cluster by cluster search of my whole drive. Aparently it is going to take 57 Hours to complete. (I hope not). I dont know what options for recovery it will give me after mind you.

Now I hope you have understood what I have wrote? I really need any help possible on this. I cant afford to lose years of collecting and of personal info. There is over 300GB on there.

Many thanks to anyone who can help me. If you can give me a working solution (If FinalData fails to work) I may even become your new best friend. lol.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any comments!

FreelanceX

Answer : Problem: Changed my partition table, now it is corrupted.

Hi FreelanceX,

How are you with Linux?

I would recommend that you download the Ubuntu live CD from here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download

Once you've downloaded the ISO and burnt it to CD you can boot off the CD into a live environment without altering anything on your hard disks.

Now install and run testdisk using the steps in the following thread:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/testdisk/+question/45126

If you don't fancy getting your hands dirty with Linux then you can always download TestDisk for Vista:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download


If you need any clarification or assistance with this please let me know.

Plod