Hi friends, I have a seagate 80GB SATA harddisk drive. I used Powerquest Partitionmagic 7.0 to hide one of my partitions. That drive is formatted in NTFS.I had some important data in it. But I am now unable to unhide the partition (its the last partition on my HDD).An error message appears as follows: "Access violation at address 0052DC00 in module PMagicNT.exe. Read of address 00000008". And partition magic program also does not exit from the taskbar. I have to manually close it.Windows does not show the drive in the my computer or explorer. But it shows the drive as healthy and unknown partition in the Adriministrative tools> computer management> disk management snapin.I reinstalled the program many times and even removed the registry entries of powerquest partition magic in the windows registry.I am sure that the files and folders are intact because i can see them as offline volumes through some image viewing software.Please help me in unhiding the partition. sys configuration: winxp pro sp1,amd athlonxp 2800+ (333fsb dual channel mode),512mb pc3200 ddr,A7N8X DELUXE mobo,geforce fx5200 128mb agp card 8x,80gb seagate sata hdd Thanks in advance.

It could be the version of PM oyu're using. You say you have version 7.0. Is that the corporate version or the home version? The corporate 7 version will work on XP NTFS partitions. The home 7 version had issues with XP NTFS partitions and thus Power Quest released version 8 of the home version.

One thing I learned is that PM doesn't make mistakes..its rock solid. If PM can't recognise it then you have a serious problem. Either the partition header information is damaged or the format is corrupted. Either way the only way to access the drive and get your data back is to use data recovery software....This has happened to me acouple of times and i have used Ontrack's Disk Recovery....its fantastic lets you see the drive as though it is live. Then just recover the information you need to another drive or partion. One you have done that reformat the partion so you can use it. Work Is The Rent We Pay For The Space We Occupy On Earth

split the hidden partition so that it is two partitions. after that make one of them active then add the partition that cant be used to the newly active partition and you will have the partition back