Help..Partition magic made my partition disappear into oblivion

[Pierre Jarry]

Something went wrong while I was merging a 6Gb NTFS patition with the
50Gb NTFS primary partition it had originally come from...(PM had
frozen and I had to reboot half way thru the process...yikes).
Now there is 6Gb of space missing on the disk that doesn't even show
up as unallocated space...
The Bios, PM and Sisoft Sandra all report the full drive size but
report nevertheless the available space as being 6Gb short of what it
ought to be...
XP and CHKDSK, unfortunately only see the "reduced size".
PM from XP or Rescue floppy doens't see anything wrong otherwise and
everything works....
It looks like the FAT is confused as to where the last sector of the
disk is....

Does anyone know of a way to "fix" this...a utility...a non
destructive formating...whatever...??

Any help would be appreciated.

Pierre

 

[Joep]

Q1. Did you read this before you rebooted ... so, was it really hanging? ...

IMPORTANT! Merging partitions may take a long time (possibly hours) if you
are working with large partitions and large amounts of data. If you want to
check whether your machine is still performing the merge operation and is
not locked up, you can press the NumLock key on your keyboard. If the
NumLock light comes on, the machine is still functioning and is not locked
up. When planning to merge partitions, you may wish to schedule the task for
a time when you will not need your system for an extended period.

Q2. You do have a backup don't you?

 

[Arno Wagner]

Something went wrong while I was merging a 6Gb NTFS patition with the
50Gb NTFS primary partition it had originally come from...(PM had
frozen and I had to reboot half way thru the process...yikes).
Now there is 6Gb of space missing on the disk that doesn't even show
up as unallocated space...
The Bios, PM and Sisoft Sandra all report the full drive size but
report nevertheless the available space as being 6Gb short of what it
ought to be...
XP and CHKDSK, unfortunately only see the "reduced size".
PM from XP or Rescue floppy doens't see anything wrong otherwise and
everything works....
It looks like the FAT is confused as to where the last sector of the
disk is....

Does anyone know of a way to "fix" this...a utility...a non
destructive formating...whatever...??

I am sorry to be unhelpful, but I found that the warning about
backing up PM gives is really needed. I also lost installations
due to PM crashing. By now I don't use it anymore. Doing
a backup, changing the partitions destructively and then
writing back the backup is just less hassle. On top of it
the last time I tried it, it could not deal with a current
ext2 filesystem...

IMO PM is completely useless, since it pretends to be able
to do something is cannot really do in many cases and on top
does damage while failing.

Today I use plain Linux fdisk or GNU Parted (comes also as
stand-alone boot floppy). Both tools require that you know
what you are doing, but they will not stab you in the back.

Arno

 

[Joep]

I am sorry to be unhelpful, but I found that the warning about

backing up PM gives is really needed. I also lost installations
due to PM crashing. By now I don't use it anymore. Doing
a backup, changing the partitions destructively and then
writing back the backup is just less hassle.

Nonsense. A backup you do anyway, right? When you use ANY tool to do low
level-ops you especially do a backup.

IMO PM is completely useless, since it pretends to be able
to do something is cannot really do in many cases and on top
does damage while failing.

In SOME cases! The only thing is you will only hear in groups like this when
it didn't work. Well let me state then that PM NEVER messed up any of my
disks and I have used it 1000's of times.

Today I use plain Linux fdisk or GNU Parted (comes also as
stand-alone boot floppy). Both tools require that you know
what you are doing, but they will not stab you in the back.

It is really stupid relying on that. I'd again say never do that without a
backup. Suggesting others that you do not need to back up when using Parted
is foolish.

 

[Pierre Jarry]

Q1. Did you read this before you rebooted ... so, was it really hanging? ...

IMPORTANT! Merging partitions may take a long time (possibly hours) if you
are working with large partitions and large amounts of data. If you want to
check whether your machine is still performing the merge operation and is
not locked up, you can press the NumLock key on your keyboard. If the
NumLock light comes on, the machine is still functioning and is not locked
up. When planning to merge partitions, you may wish to schedule the task for
a time when you will not need your system for an extended period.

No, I hadn't seen this warning.....wish I had....I was running PM from
the rescue disk...supposedly safer....this NumLock key tip would have
clarified things.

Q2. You do have a backup don't you?

Joep

There wasn't any data on the partition I was merging...I don't believe
the PM Rescue disks create a backup of your partition layout....is
there something that does...?