Deadly disaster!

I used Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to merge 2 seperate partitions on the same hard drive together, and when the process was complete [ 4 hours later ], and the system rebooted, the partition I merged was gone!!! All my files [ About 300GB of video, photos, and personal data ] were gone!!! I followed the steps EXACTLY to merge a partition [ I didn't have any hard drive space to back up the data ], and NEVER expected to lose EVERYTHING! Is there any possible way to regain my data? I had a lot of pictures and video of family members who have since passed away, and these were the only copies in existance [ I bought this new hard drive just to store this stuff on ]

 

relentlesstech:

I would highly advise that you avoid writing anything further to this disk. If possible, remove it and mount it in another PC as a slave drive while attempting forensics. You don't want anything writing to this disk until you get your files recovered.

Take a look at data recovery software like GetDataBack. They have a trial version so you can see if it will find any of your files before making a commitment.

 

Didn't work

I've lost everything - Anyways, thanks for your help...

 

I'm really sad to hear that. Depending on the value of the data to you it appears that your only alternative may be a data recovery service.

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In the hopes of helping someone else avoid this, I would never, never use the merge function in partitioning software. As implemented, a merge requires:
1) Data on the partition B first be copied to partition A
2) Partition B be deleted leaving unallocated free space
3) Partition A be resized to include the free space.

It's step 1) that is the tricky part. What will the program do if there isn't enough space on partition A to copy all of the files from partition B? Will it only copy some of them? Will it give up and refuse to copy any of them? Will some kind of error occur? Will data loss occur?

The best course of action is do the above three steps manually instead of relying on the merge function to do it automatically. Only after you are sure that you have all of your files safely copied over should you do steps 2 and 3. It is also wise to make a backup of your data files in case something goes wrong.

If there were a survey, I would vote that Acronis remove the Merge and Split functions from their software - both are accidents waiting to happen.

relentlesstech, I know this is too little too late but perhaps someone else who reads this can benefit.