Hello, I'm having a problem with Partition Magic 8 on a Windows XP computer. I am trying to merge 2 partitions on a second hard drive which has 4 total partitions. Usually, since Partition Magic is running from my primary hard drive C:, it doesn't need to reboot to do this kind of thing. But today, it wanted to reboot. So I allowed it. Big mistake. Upon restart, it went into the blue screen and started to do its Merge thing. Now, it has never taken me longer than 15 mins to merge (< 5GB, FAT32) partitions on a second hard drive from within Windows, so I got pretty impatient when it hung there at 11% after 20 mins. So, I cut it off and restarted. It tried to go again but I quit out and went into Windows. I fired up PM and it told me it wanted to "recover partition". Good, I said... So at the moment, it's hanging at the Recover Partition window, saying "searching for recovery markers, please wait". It's been that way for an hour and PM won't start. So, should I wait it out overnight? Or is it hung up? Is there any other program I can use to recover my invisible partition? I'm not having a spaz attack yet since I did back it up, but darnit, there has to be a way to at least get that space back and start PM again. Thanks.

Your mistake was killing PM before it had finished merging the partitions, it's probably unrecoverable now. In future, let it do it's job.

Update - I let it run over 12 hours and it did recover my partition and all of the data =) . It didn't look like it was doing anything at all but eventually the message changed and PM started up. When I restarted the computer the partition returned! Yes, I've learned my lesson.