I have 1 HDD. There are 4 partitions, C: (50GB), D: (30GB), E: (200GB), F: (186GB) All NTFS file systems. Today I managed to make D: active and change some drive letters, with Paragon Hard Disk Manager Server 2009. I format D: as FAT32 file system. After reboot, I cannot see any partitions except C: (the one my Windows is using). I reinstall Windows 7 and during installation, it tells me that I have 4 partitions but the total GB amount is over 600, which exceeds the actual, 466GB. Then I install Acronis Disk Director and it tells me I have 50GB for C: , 30GB for D: , 17 GB unallocated, 186 GB no drive letter , 186GB unallocated. It once again reports me the wrong values, I really don't know what to do at all. CMD diskpart.exe shows me: Partition 1 Primary 50GB Offset: 0GB Partition 2 Primary 30GB Offset: 50GB Partition 0 Extended 385GB Offset: 80GB Partition 3 Primary 184GB Offset: 2145GB I am trying to use R-Tools or Active Partition Recovery. But I don't know will they work. I'm not sure will formatting a partition as FAT32 affect the rest partitions. Perhaps Paragon HDM 2009 made a mistake. Everyone please help, I have a lot of important data in E: and F: Should I bring my computer to have some fix?
Why use fat32? Try booting from a linux cd or a windows pe and copy off all your data to an external drive. Then wipe the hard drive and start all over again.
hey, install seven to C partition and format all the others with the tool provided during choose where install 7(advanced options) When seven is installed, go to start menu and tipe create and format disk partition. Now you can do whatever you want with your partitions, it is easy to use, and efficient nice going
Since you have critical data, you need to preserve that data first. There are numerous ways to do that. Use a partition recovery program such as Active @ Partition Recovery, or similar, to try and get the partitions back. If all those attempts fail you're pretty much stuck with the following: Pull the drive and attached it as an additional drive in another PC capable of reading the disk -or- Boot using a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu and copy off the data -or- Take the drive to a data recovery outfit -or- Some other way to extract your important data of which you are aware. After you have preserved your critical data: Wipe the entire drive removing all partitions using PTD , GPartEd or similar Establish your partitions the way you want them with NTFS file format Reinstall your OS onto the C: partition Copy back your critical data Create an image using Backup and Restore, Acronis or similar Backup, backup, backup
zahnoo is right. DO NOT write any new data onto the HDD, since you didn't know what really has happened. To preserve data has the first priority. I usually try to access the HDD as non system HDD, either from a life CD, or another sys HDD with OS installed, or I plug it into another PC. I never had problems with partitions, but with partial damage (physically).
Thanks for all of your answers. But as all these processes would take much time, depending on the importance of my data and after an hour of consideration, I decided not to take further actions. But perhaps the Paragon software had made a repartition itself and therefore I lost my data. So I think I am possibly not going to get the data back. Luckily I'm only a student but not an official, I only have to apologize to myself. I learnt a lesson after this accident actually. Anyway, thanks for all you guys' help. I really appreciate.