Disappearing D drive

I have an old laptop running XP Pro which has a partitioned hard drive giving C, D and F drives. The C drive is virtually full whilst the other two drives are almost empty.

Using Hard Disk Manager 2011 and the Merge Partitions Wizard I attempted to remove the partition between the D and F drives. Then I was then going to remove the partition between the two remaining drives to create one large drive.

All seemed to go well with merging D and F until the process completed. But now the D drive has completely disappeared taking with it MS Office and the Hard Disk Manager and everything else that was was on the old D drive!

Any suggestions gratefully received

 

Try the paragon partition undelete fuction.

 

Thanks SIW2, I tried that - got the D drive back but it is corrupted and unreadable. I get a message on startup saying one of the disks needs to b e checked for consistency. The serial no is 1064-1063 disk and appears to be a non windows xp disk. There is an error in writing the output log.

The message then disappears and the computer slowly opens, then takes ages to do anything as it keeps looking for things that were on the D drive.

 

I've had a similar problem because indexing got corrupt. The D: drive would disappear. I solved this problem by using my UBCD 4 Windows XP CD to do the repair! Windows can't see the drive, therefore it can't repair it. So I use the 'NTFS for DOS' on the first menu and use Chekdisk on the following menu. Chekdisk utility has to be run twice. The first time to restore the Index and files. the second time to reset the NTFS partition parameters. why this program can recognize it as an NTFS partition and windows can't? Who knows!!!

 

Thanks for your reply. I haven't got a UBCD and as the computer is at least 7 years old I think it will be cheaper in tthe long run to get a new computer.

Tried something else with Paragon and now have D drive back but it contains everything that was was on the F drive but not Microsoft Office that was on the original D drive.. Now the E drive is corrupted and not recognised. (I don't think I had an E drive before!)

Wish I had never tried to sort out the partitions. I have ended up with a much slower laptop and 11 gigs somewhere in the ether.