No Operating System Found!

[JamieB]

Hi everyone.
I decided it would be a good idea to Partition the 500GB C Drive on my wife's PC so she could separate the O/S and Programs from Data such as photos etc. I sought (or thought I did!) to shrink the C partition so that I could create another partition in the generated unallocated space, a "D" drive.

After the operations were completed "No operating system could be found" The Single "C" drive on the HDD has now been replaced with a small "Free" partition of a few GB, an Unformatted partition which is of the size I expected the shrunken C drive to be and a "Free" partition which is what I wanted to make into the "D" drive. I am busily using the undele wizard to reverse my mistake before my wife finds out and kills me. Any advice as to what I did wrong and if I am doing the right thing to reverse the damage would be GREATLY apprieciated!

Thanks

[Hungry Man]

Get a recovery DVD and try to reinstall the MBR.

[JamieB]

Is this the same as rebuilding the MBR? If so it didn't work. I have now found the windows recovery disk. Will this restore the earlier partition structure as well as, hopefully, the operating system? I suppose the data files are lost forever :-(


Thanks

J

[tgell]

You could try to recover the data with either PhotoRec or Minitools Power Data Recovery (1 GB free). Easeus also has a recovery utility.

Another option would be to connect the drive to another computer. Use Easeus Partition Manager and scan the drive to recover your original partition structure. If that does not work, delete the partitions you now have and then do a rescan. It may find the original partition structure. Before you do this though I would try the above data recovery.

http://www.partition-tool.com/partit...ned-drives.htm

[JamieB]

I tried all the above, with no succes so a re-installation was the only option. Fortunately I had previously backed up all the important data on this PC so it wasn't too difficult a task.

Regards

J

[Robin A.]

Strange. Reducing the size of the system partition is a fairly safe process, at least when done properly and manually, which is better than using a "split partition wizard".

[JamieB]

Agreed! I have done it quite sucessfully a number of times on my PCs. Maybe I made a mistake in setting it up. Still, all is ok now.

Thanks.

J

[biscuits]

Twice I've tried shrinking a system partition with a Paragon software and twice it ruined the system drive. In both cases, the "shrunked" system drive has a total size of twice its occupied space.

[JRViejo]

Removed Off Topic Post.