Recover partition

Hello,

I did I a fatal mistake and resized my partition with a third partition tool called paragon. My operating system is windows vista. Now I have a serious problem. My Windows installation is not bootable anymore. It says NTLDR ist missing.

Now I'm trying to recover data with acronis disk director. It displays the windows partition as C partition (NTFS - 90 GB). This partition is part of my larger harddisk. 150 GB are unallocated.

There is a small icon which looks like a red cross in the left corner of this partition. I don't know what this means. Is there a way to make the windows partition work again? The partition was not formatted.

When I click on the properties of NTFS partition C: and on errors it says:

File system error: Invalid partition size

There are also no folders or I can't open any. Item "Special" under File System says:

Reserved (boot record): 0 bytes (0sectors)
Log file size 0 bytes (0sectors)

"File records says":

Size 0 bytes
Total 0 bytes
Free 0 bytes

 

The red "X" on a partition means that DiskDirector (DD) sees errors on the partition. From your description it sounds like two things happened here. First, the "NTLDR is missing" error is produced from the master boot record (MBR) code of a Windows XP MBR. You should have a Vista MBR which has different error messages. So your MBR must have been replaced when you ran Paragon. Second, since you're getting an "Invalid Partition Size" error, the partition table must have also been damaged. So you have two things to fix. The first is easy, the second may not be so easy.

So first the hard part. I would try the "Recover Partitions" wizard in DD. Boot from the DiskDirector rescue CD and start DD. Try the "Recover Partitions" wizard and see if it can figure out how to fix up your partition table.

If so, then you're home free. However, Windows Vista probably still won't boot. So next you should start up from the Vista DVD and do a repair. This operation should repair the MBR and allow Vista to boot.

If you're lucky then that should get you back in operation.

 

Hi k0lo,

I don't know what I did, I was experementing with Acronis and with the free tool Testdisk but I run Acronis now again after playing with Testdisk.

Oh Jesus, my partition is there. I can't believe it but Acronis shows my partition. It shows C: with 150 GB and D: with 90 GB. D is my Windows partition. Acronis even shows all the folders and files of D.

I run Vistas Repair Tool and it found a Vista partition. But there is still the NTLDR problem which could not be fixed by Vistas rescue disk.

However I was sitting for 10 hours in front of my computer. Now I can see my data with Acronis. I just have to make Vista working again.

How do I do that?

 

Stefan:

Do you have a dual-boot installation? Is Vista on C: and Windows XP on D:? If so, one thing to check is to use DD to find out which partition is active. To boot Vista you will probably want C: to be the active partition. IF it isn't active, right-click on the C: partition and choose "Advanced" and "Set Active".

If C: is the active partition then I would try replacing the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the drive. You would boot from the Vista DVD and run the recovery console. The command for replacing the MBR in Vista is:

Code:

BootRec /FixMbr

 

Previously I had a Dual boot installation. However now I have a partition with 150 GB (C) and a partition with 90 GB (D - my windows partition). I tried to hide the 150 GB partition with Acronis. Now my Windows partition is C.

It tried to fix NTLDR problem with Vistas repair tool. Vista is now recongnizing my Vista partition. But there still appears this error:

I tried

Code:

d:\boot\bootsect /nt60 C:

It was a success. But the problem is still there. I can't boot from my Windows partition.

I don't want to crash my partition again. How can I see with Acronis if partition C is active? How about fixing MBR. Is this a dangerous procedure?

EDIT: Oh my god, I started Acronis and set partition C to active. Now Vista is booting! I can't believe it. Thanks a lot k0lo! This was a hard day.

 

Stefan:

That's great! 10 hours at the computer is too much though. You need to take a break and go celebrate.

Best of luck,

** EDIT
I should have spotted this earlier but my post #2 was in error. The MBR error messages are "Error Loading Operating System" or "Missing Operating System". The error messages in the partition boot record of an NTFS partition created with Windows XP are "NTLDR Missing" or "NTLDR is compressed". Therefore I should have suspected that your system was trying to boot from the D: partition instead of the C: partition. And that's what it was.

 

Hi,

now I know that it was indeed a problem with Paragon 8.5. The support team told me:

A dangerous Software. They officially said that 8.5 is fully Vista compatible. That was not the case!

Fortunately, I was able to recover the partition with your help.