Hi - I'm in big trouble! This is what I've done and it's going to take some explaining so please bare with me: Originally my PC had a 30gb Maxtor drive with 2 partitions - XP was on an NTFS partition and all data (including 4 years of family photos)was on a fat 32 second partition. I bought a bigger drive, and reinstalled XP on it. All was well. Then I decided to merge the 2 partitions on the old drive. I used Partition Magic (never again) to convert the Fat 32 to NTFS and then instructed it to merge. Half way through the merging process PM announced that there were too many errors and just stopped. Windows no longer recognised the 2nd HDD. I used a dos based prog (DiskPatch) to repair the MBR. When XP restarted it ran CHKDSK and made a whole stack of changes. When XP eventaully started I could see the drive and the directories and folders but no files. I've now run a prog called 'getdataback'. This shows all my original files together with their names, but all the files appear to be 'empty' and can't be opened - ie. their size is zero. Presumably the files are now damaged. Is there any way of recovering them short of sending the drive to a data recovery firm at great expence? Any help before I have to confess to the wife would be very gratefully received. Thank you. Jon

tough one, try Disk Investigator (it's free) and go to directories and search through the all the deleted files (in red) and try to open them from there, some may still be readable. 3 words of advise backup, backup, backup. good luck Peace.

do you know if the conversion fronm fat to ntfs actually went through? Try manually converting it at a cmd prompt, it may just not have a valid file system and that is why the pic files cannot be read. Whatever you do DONT install anyhting to the drive with the pics as it may overwrite the space on the HD where they are. If you do end up having to use a recovery service, let me know as I know of a very good on in Atlanta.

If your family pictures are important enough then I would not play any further with it because you can easily make it worse. Remove the drive and take it to a data recovery pro. They WILL be able to rescue most of the data... but it won't be cheap!! Next time BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! When it comes to the family pics, wills, etc, I have (no word of a lie) backups of the backups.

Thanks for all the advice so far. I have downloaded Disk Investigator and Spinrite and will try them tonight (thanks Stimpy & Justy respectively). I think the conversion to NTFS was successful because the 'getdataback' software recognised the partition as such. Do you think it makes sense to partition my (working) C drive and to put a ghost image of the bad D drive on it before trying this software out? If the software didn't work, would I then be able to send the image to a data recovery expert as well as the drive itself? By the way - this has really driven home the BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP message - it won't happen again. J

Just a note-Spinrite may take a loooong time to run. I have seen it take 3 days, but it did recover the data.

Just to update this post- I still haven't recovered my photos! Spinrite got stuck at the 'disvovering mass storage devices' stage - I gave it plenty of time - 3 days - Clearly there is something about the drive it didn't like. Getdataback did show all my lost files - all the correct file names are there but their size is zero megabites - what's going on there? Thanks for trying anyway folks. If anyone else has any bright ideas please let me know.