Reset partition?

[Dan Traut]

Hey all, hope you can help... PartitionMagic saw that I hadn't made rescue
discs and decided to teach me a lesson :-)

I have 3 hard drives - a 60 gig internal, an 80 gig internal, and an 80 gig
external FireWire. Drives 1 and 2 have two partitions (c/e and d/f, drive
letter-wise), while the external has one partition. All are ntfs.

Anyway, PartitionMagic 7.0 hiccupped, and now drive F: shows up as
unformatted. I downloaded some utilities and can see that my files are
still there, but I will need to pony up the dough to recover these files.
I'm wondering if there's a way for me to reset the F drive partition to
ntfs, or should I just pay for the full license of the utilities I tested
and find some way to make room for 70 gigs of info temporarily. I have
some computer knowledge, but apparently not enough to figure out how to do
this on my own.

Thanks in advance!

[M.H.]

Post by Dan Traut
Hey all, hope you can help... PartitionMagic saw that I hadn't made rescue
discs and decided to teach me a lesson :-)
I have 3 hard drives - a 60 gig internal, an 80 gig internal, and an 80 gig
external FireWire. Drives 1 and 2 have two partitions (c/e and d/f, drive
letter-wise), while the external has one partition. All are ntfs.
Anyway, PartitionMagic 7.0 hiccupped, and now drive F: shows up as
unformatted. I downloaded some utilities and can see that my files are
still there, but I will need to pony up the dough to recover these files.
I'm wondering if there's a way for me to reset the F drive partition to
ntfs, or should I just pay for the full license of the utilities I tested
and find some way to make room for 70 gigs of info temporarily. I have
some computer knowledge, but apparently not enough to figure out how to do
this on my own.
Thanks in advance!

You can't "reset" the partition to NTFS without formatting it. Norton
Systemworks has a utility that enables you to pull data from drives, but
it's rather technical. In any case, you probably have to purchase a
data recovery app. Have you contacted Symantec about Partition Magic
eating your drive? They might be able to fix it. I use V-COM Partition
Commander myself, cheaper, no problems so far.