Hard Drive problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter coolerweb
  • Start date Start date
coolerweb said:
Hi,

I created a thread in another section of this forum regarding my hard
drive problem...

Follow the link below

http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/ftopic59608.html
Click to expand...

Shit. Ummmm . . . there are good programs to resize partitions. Partition
Magic is supposed to be one of the better ones. But with any program that
messes with partitions, there is always the possibility that something
really bad will happen, as you have learned.

Your ONLY course of action right now is to use Partition Magic to try to
convert the "unknown" partition to something that Windows 98SE and Windows
XP will recognize, such as FAT32. Unfortunately, you are likely to lose ALL
data on the partition by doing this. Your best bet would be to (re)install
Partition Magic on your D: partition, as E: is not accessible. Running
Partition Magic from D:, see if there is an option in the program to Repair
or Rebuild a damaged partition. IF SO, then you MIGHT be able to convert
that "unknown" to something useful without destroying the data.

Basically, whatever PM did, PM will have to undo, if that's even possible.
Good luck, -Dave
 
Bummer!!!

I knew I shouldn't have tried that PM program... not only it did not
have proper warning, it just screws up the computer as well...

Heh... no more partition for me... The proper time to use partition is
when the hard drive is a new drive... any time other than that its a
very VERY risky thing to do.....

Thanks symantec... now you just screw up my whole computer >.<

Yea, Dave I'll try installing it on my C: or D: and hopefully I can
retain my files from E: :'( because I really have important stuff in
there...

I thought there are programs out there that can still retrieve data
despite that hard drive was formatted/partitioned? Can't those program
work on this matter?
 
Yo Dave,

I figured the problem out after knowing that the partition format PM
used to convert my partition into is Pqrp....

After searching through google, I found this program that can convert
it back....

However that converting didn't go very smooth... NOT all but most of
my stuffs are turned into jumbles/ascii codes that doesn't make any
sense whatsoever.... I lost alot of mp3/docs/videos because of this
CRAPPY PM....

I suggest to EVERYONE to NEVER EVER EVER partition your hard drive
with PM... its absolutely annoying, crap and make alot of problem and
can cause your HD to lose all your important files....

Now I am slowly backing up all of my 'possible to be recovered' files
and I think i have to reformat my drive E:....

Overall I lost around 30~40Gb of stuffs.... thats how gay PM for ya...
 
coolerweb said:
Yo Dave,

I figured the problem out after knowing that the partition format PM
used to convert my partition into is Pqrp....

After searching through google, I found this program that can convert
it back....

However that converting didn't go very smooth... NOT all but most of
my stuffs are turned into jumbles/ascii codes that doesn't make any
sense whatsoever.... I lost alot of mp3/docs/videos because of this
CRAPPY PM....

I suggest to EVERYONE to NEVER EVER EVER partition your hard drive
with PM... its absolutely annoying, crap and make alot of problem and
can cause your HD to lose all your important files....

Now I am slowly backing up all of my 'possible to be recovered' files
and I think i have to reformat my drive E:....

Overall I lost around 30~40Gb of stuffs.... thats how gay PM for ya...
Click to expand...
If you have Gbs of data without a backup you have an accident waiting to
happen. If not PM, drive can just fail without warning at ANY time.
Mike.
 
it's even worse than that, pm will come up in dos mode from command
line. (that's because that's how it does all of it's converting etc.-
the programs that do that are dos programs ) you can run it from dos.
when it comes up, it even recognizes all your partitions, even the
one that says type PQrP. except that the only options that are posible
under operations are format and delete.
isnt that helpfull !!. in other words even though you can get back
into pm from a dos prompt (via boot diskette or cd) it wont undo
anything or convert it back to ntfs or fat32 or anything else. that
blows chunks.

im not ever going to use pm again period. we used to use it to resize
partitions etc. untill one day on one machine it bombed. next morning
our machine wouldnt boot and because it was now a pqrp partition we
couldnt fix it either. had to reformat, re-install the os and restore
from backups. took all day.
 
BILLEMERY said:
it's even worse than that, pm will come up in dos mode from command
line. (that's because that's how it does all of it's converting etc.-
the programs that do that are dos programs ) you can run it from dos.
when it comes up, it even recognizes all your partitions, even the
one that says type PQrP. except that the only options that are posible
under operations are format and delete.
isnt that helpfull !!. in other words even though you can get back
into pm from a dos prompt (via boot diskette or cd) it wont undo
anything or convert it back to ntfs or fat32 or anything else. that
blows chunks.

im not ever going to use pm again period. we used to use it to resize
partitions etc. untill one day on one machine it bombed. next morning
our machine wouldnt boot and because it was now a pqrp partition we
couldnt fix it either. had to reformat, re-install the os and restore
from backups. took all day.
Click to expand...

The name PQrP indicates a recoverable partition (but it might not be
depending on when Partition Magic was interrupted in the process).

Fixing a Recoverable Partition with PTEDIT

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPOR...agic&ver=8.x&src=sg&pcode=npmagic&svy=&csm=no

The old powerquest article on this matter mentions the partition's type as
PQrP but it appears that Symantec has removed all mention of it for some
reason. Makes me wonder if it's because the PQ in the name stands for
PowerQuest. But that means you can only find the repair procedure with
PTEDIT if you already know what the solution is or can intuitively 'decode'
the meaning of PQrP to be 'recoverable partition'.
 
thanx for the info, if i ever run into this again ill know what to try
at least.
ptedit. i had some partition tools but not ptedit. didnt know you
could just change the type and recover... it says that it "may not
work" depending on where in the process it was interupted. actually
when it happend to me, there was no interuption. it took all night to
do it and the next day i had this message on the screen that 2000
couldnt boot because some system file was corrupted. went in and
looked at the partitions and found this PQrP partition.
 
coolerweb said:
Yo Dave,

I figured the problem out after knowing that the partition format PM
used to convert my partition into is Pqrp....

After searching through google, I found this program that can convert
it back....

However that converting didn't go very smooth... NOT all but most of
my stuffs are turned into jumbles/ascii codes that doesn't make any
sense whatsoever.... I lost alot of mp3/docs/videos because of this
CRAPPY PM....

I suggest to EVERYONE to NEVER EVER EVER partition your hard drive
with PM... its absolutely annoying, crap and make alot of problem and
can cause your HD to lose all your important files....

Now I am slowly backing up all of my 'possible to be recovered' files
and I think i have to reformat my drive E:....

Overall I lost around 30~40Gb of stuffs.... thats how gay PM for ya...
Click to expand...

Well, I have used Partition Magic to change file type from FAT32 to
NTFS, create a partition by using spare space on an existing partition,
decrease the size of a partition, increase the size of one partition by
using space from another partition ALL without losing any data and with
ease. I suggest the problems you have had are due to your own ignorance
and/or careless actions. Partition Magic is one of the best programs I
have ever used.

jimbo
 
BILLEMERY said:
thanx for the info, if i ever run into this again ill know what to try
at least.
ptedit. i had some partition tools but not ptedit. didnt know you
could just change the type and recover... it says that it "may not
work" depending on where in the process it was interupted. actually
when it happend to me, there was no interuption. it took all night to
do it and the next day i had this message on the screen that 2000
couldnt boot because some system file was corrupted. went in and
looked at the partitions and found this PQrP partition.
Click to expand...

Well, 'interrupted' doesn't necessarily mean by user action. It means that
something prevented partition magic from completing everything which, for
example, could also be an error of some sort.

One should run a disk check and bad block scan to ensure the hard drive is
error free before running partitionmagic.
 
found an old harddrive that had a PMrP on it and tried the ptedit.exe
program (which wasnt on the powerquest disk) and still lost all data.
because i left it running overnight when i did the resize, i have no
idea at what point it had a problem etc. probably because the
harddrive was going bad or something. ill make the rescue disks next
time.
 
BILLEMERY said:
found an old harddrive that had a PMrP on it and tried the ptedit.exe
program (which wasnt on the powerquest disk) and still lost all data.
because i left it running overnight when i did the resize, i have no
idea at what point it had a problem etc. probably because the
harddrive was going bad or something. ill make the rescue disks next
time.
Click to expand...

A bad hard drive can certainly cause problems.
 
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