XP broke partition? I have my boot drive as an NTFS with XP on, and another drive thats FAT32 that was partitioned with Partition Magic on Win98. The first partition works, but the second (logical drive) partition doesnt anymore. XP Disk Management reports it as blank, and 100% free and as RAW type. This is obviously wrong. It seems XP is constantly trying to access the drive, and slows down drastically. It used to take 30 seconds to boot, now its half an hour! Any ideas on what I can do to retrieve data off it?

How big is the harddrive? If over 137GB and your MBoard is old, this may be the problem. As far as retrieving the files goes you may be able to copy the files to another source if one is available locally or by network by using Knoppix Linux. This is a distro of Linux that needs no installation. It runs off of one CDR. the Total size of the download is 699MBs. I have used this program in a test mode to access files and it seems to work. If copying NTFS files you need to use a different program on the disk. Help files are clear and concise. Linux doesn't need the file allocation tables that Windows uses to access the files. Knoppix can be downloaded for free or can be purchased online for a nominal fee if you don't have a fast connection.

You could try going into Partition Magic and seeing if the drive is Hidden. If so, then just unhide it.

Thanks for the suggestions. Its a 40Gb drive, and the motherboard is only a few years old. I probably should have mentioned that the drive was working fine for a week after I put in XP. Anyway, in the end, I used GetDataBak for FAT and managed to retrieve most of the files from the damaged partition. It reported alot of bad sectors. What I want to do now, is repartition the drive then reformat. What shall I do this in? Shall I use the Maxblast Utility as its a Maxtor drive, or shall I use the Recovery Console and use fdisk and all that? Id like to see if I can repair the partition first, shall I use chkdisk, fixboot or fixmbr? Or are they just for the boot primary drive with an OS on it? Many thanks for any help.

Bad sectors?!? Don't format the drive!!! REPLACE IT. Otherwise you can format, install, put your data and lose it all again. Bad sectors are physical defects on the drive platters. No software can fix that. Scandisk/chdksk /f can mark them as unusable but many is the sign of failing media