Partition Table

[Berserker]

You may want to look into getting Hard Drive Mechanic (Google for it). I had a severe alignment problem with my hard drive (something in the data got mis-set). I bought this $49 program and had it check, then repair it, and everything came back 100% functional.

[beelzebub]

if you have another computer or another hard drive laying around, put your wierd hard drive into that computer or put the spare hard drvie in your computer.

Boot to windows on the different hard drive, the one without the problem. Then see if you can see all of your partitions in "my computer", they will appear as seperate drives. If you only see 2 new drives instead of three that means that a partition is no longer partitioned and you have lost your data.

Or boot to the XP cd and check all of your partitions. If you see unpartitioned space that is more than 8mbs then a partition was deleted,

[Tanglefoot]

Don't know if slivester is still around or solved his prob but I had the same recently. After much headscratching and trying numerous 'variations on a theme' it became obvious that this could not be remedied from within Windows through Admin tools or Partition magic, nor could Fdisk help in DOS. The solution is to run a start up disc that gives CD support and at DOS prompt access CD Drive with PM on it then run the Dos variant of PM. This picks up the NTFS partition and allows you to change format to FAT32, at which stage you can re-boot to Win and use the normal progs to do whatever you wish. Hope this helps anyone else who has this glitch.

[drvondoom]

Silvester i dont know if you are still around, but considering there are quite a few proposed solutions i was wondering if you found a solution that worked. I have the EXACT same problem and I am using the exact same computer. Thanks

[blackhat]

If your Windows XP OS is in a FAT32 partition, It wont recognize an NTFS partition. So you cant access the files you are trying to recover. You can try converting the OS system partition to NTFS or if you insist on running FAT32, the whole disk must be FAT32, meaning you will have to work on the disk before Windows loads. ie Change 1st boot to CD and use a disk utility disk. Quote that you can find anywhere- " Large disks need the NTFS, not the neolithic(stone age) FAT32". DOS prompt=C:\ went away during the versions development of Win95. Windows DOS prompt=C:\>, Windows template over the DOS. In XP, you have a "Command Prompt", willing to perform some DOS commands. DRB

[drvondoom]

All my drives are NTFS