Hi guys,
I was doing a favor for my aunt. Here's the deal.

She has XP Pro and 3 partitions on 2 physical drives. C:, D:, and G:, where G is a 1 physical 80GB drive. D: was used for storage (10GB), while C: ofcourse was the OS (8GB). Her question to me was could we merge the 2 together? I remembered using Partition magic before and seeing that funtion though I have never used it.
While booting to Part. Magic, I choose to Merge the D: to C: and it asked for a folder name and choose to name the folder "Storage". I walked away for a moment, came back to see an "Error 50" and the rebooted the system. No the HD is not reconized by windows at all, when running diags on the HD in DOS it shows bad sectors all the way through. Is it possible that a perfectly good HD now has Physically bad sectors? Am I missing something?
Things I have done : 1 - Tried XP cd to get to the install screen (Shows drive G: as C: now and the original C, D drives show as "Setup can not access this drive" 2 - Ran tufftestpro on it (Shows bad sectors, fails all test) 3 - Ran Fresh Diagnostics (Shows drive as garbeled information)&*^^%&%^$%^#^%$%&^%) 4 - I tried everything I knew.....anyone have any idea?

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

oooops, I clicked too fast...lol

Last time I did it with an XP machine, I had to install Partition Magic, then run the program from within Windows...after I made the selections, the system rebooted & the changes were made. What version of PM did you use?

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

Partition Magic 7 which I am seeing in another post was "designed for Win2000" not XP? Both are NTFS so I wouldn't have thought it would matter. It looks like Partition Magic 8 is what I should have used. But how can it be that this drive is completly unuseable now. That just doesn't seem right.
I have the drive now in my computer as I promised I would do everything in my power to get it up and running. It's set as my slave drive and only 2 programs so far even reconize it...windows doesn't even see it. The 2 diagnostic prgrams that do see it are giving errors.

PM 7.0 supports WinXP

http://www.gtpcc.org/gtpcc/partition7.htm

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

Any clue to how this could have ruined a perfectly good HD or if software even has the ability to physically ruin the sectors? It just doesn't make sence to me. Any special software that it may take to undo Partition magic's undoing?

Use Delpart to delete the partitions and redo with WinXP. Find Delpart here: Radified.com/files
If you need to salvage files from the drives you could try to use Knoppix Linux. That distro runs off of a CD and should be able to salvage the files by copy and paste. This download is big, 699MBs. Find it here: http://www.knoppix.net/get.php
The more you play with the drives the less likely to recover.

Thanks alot, I already have Knopix but never thought about using it to gain access. I'll try that now.
Thanks again....I'll be back.

I booted to the CD and am now at the desktop but it only shows the drives I could already see. is there a way to search for a drive in this OS? I am not fluent in Knoppix at all but could sure give it a shot.

Knoppix shows my 80GB drive jus fine along with Floppy and 2-cd rom drives. I am guessing that it's not showing it because of the "bad sector" problem.

Just an FYI, my bios when booting does show the slave drive. Again, like stated before, since "error 50" occurred, I have only been able to get 2 programs so far to see the drive. Could PM have labeled it in such a way that it can not be seen?

Knoppix was a great idea but doesn't seem to be coming up in there. I'm trying to utilize the tools within Knoppix to gain access to the drive right now. Thanks again guys.....more help if possible.

Sorry, I don't know Knoppix either. but my suggestion would be to go to the manufacturer's site for the drive in question and download any utilities they offer. Most manufaturers have utilities designed just for their drives that allow you to restore the drive to it's factory state.

Michael J

Error 50 is related to a possible bad read error. Actually what you should have done was backup before attempting the merge. Then do a thorough scandisk and defrag before the merge.

Here is all the thnigs I have tried so far.

Tufftest shows nthing but errors on the drive, fresh diagnose now shows the drive w/out the garbeled information and lists all the stats of the drive (LBA Sectors, etc), Partition Magic doesn't even see the driver. Windows and KNoppix doesn't see the drive either. I ran DataLifguard on it and it shows Cable erros right off the bat. (Can't be a cable issue since I have tried it in 3 different system, 3 different cables and as master and slave.)

I normally would have let this go and bought a new drive a long time ago but A-It's not my drive B-I want to know how software can render a HD useless after merging partitions.

Thanks again guys, I am not giving up on this one and will be posting more, any more suggestions would be nice. Thanks again.

Were these two drives different file systems? If either one of them was FAT32 then the cluster size would be different, thereby complicating the merge. I think part of the process is to resize ahead of time. I have limited experience with PM, but if memory serves me correctly PM7 doesn't handle NTFS disks well and when running from a command prompt I don't think you are supposed to resize the boot partition. I may be totally wrong on all counts. I am just throwing out my thoughts because you are searching for possible reasons for failure. One other thing, I seem to remember an undo function when running from the command prompt. Probably too late for that though.

i seem to remember losing a drive when playing with PM once (i was trying to create a new partition for linux)...turns out PM reset or set a flag on the partition marking it unuseable. I had to use a dos partitioning program (can't remember the name)...i had it show me the partitions, and then i changed the flag back so that the system can see the partition again.

Both drives were NTFS and if it matters at all - I was moving an empty partition into the C drive partition. After this happened and searching through the forums here, I seen where someone said that PM7 wasn't compatible with XP"s NTFS but was with Win2K's NTFS. But then someone said that it is comp. w/both.

What you ( ... )just said about the resetting or flagging the partition seems to make a little sence. There has to be some big daddy program out there, whether dos or windows based, that can detect the drive and make it usable again.

At this point, I would like to still have access to the data as it's pretty important to my aunt, but it's looking like I'll be lucky to even be able to use the drive at all.

I'll search for a dos program like ... said. I'll be back

I believe the drive makers each have a low level format utility that should make the disk usable again. As I have said in the past, I could be wrong about that. I,m not sure a program like that would be part of the package supplied with a new drive though. My understanding is that a low level format is a last result. Did you ever try Delpart?

I seem to have the same problem. I used Partition Magic to resize my 120 GB XP Pro NTFS partition 10 GB smaller to make space for Fedora Core 3. I should make note my hard drive is SATA. Towards the end of the process, PM displayed some errors about batch files or something not being read. After reboot, my computer now is in a reboot loop. It restarts a second after entering the XP splash screen. My motherboards Silicon SATA controller does recognize it. Windows XP recovery console tells me it cannot find any drives and quits out. Fdisk acknowledges the partition but with unrealistic values such as, Filesystem: NPFS and Size: -133mb. Very Strange. I tried switching the HD with a spare one with 2000 Server installed. It gets to the Win 2000 Server splash screen, then says inaccessible boot device. An interesting fact is the BIOS does recognize it, but it won't boot. I wonder if the corruption done by PM has spread to the motherboard since that HD works perfectly fine on my other computer. I then tried my friends HD with XP Pro on it and this time, the BIOS does not recognize it but it gives an inaccessible boot device error before entering the XP splash screen.

I'm running out of ideas. Reformatting is not an option since I have 2 years worth of college work and a few games I created. I did not backup before because I am an idiot. Now there is an option that for qc and myself that could work out nicely or ugly. I'm talking about data recovery software. One of the programs I saw said it can retrieve files from the disk even if it has been reformatted. Is there any truth to this? Does anyone have experience with data recovery software? On a side note, I would like to make a point brought up by someone above. Linux cannot read NTFS partitions. Knoppix will recognize the drive but cannot read it. If the HD was formatted as FAT32, then you would be in luck. I want to thank everyone for their help. Please respond if you can provide any assistance. As for qc, have you fixed the problem? Thanks.