Windows decided on its own to initialize one of my disks today for no good reason and it wouldn't let me stop it before it "initialized" it. I'm not entirely sure what it did, but I'm thinking it killed the partition information without formatting the drive. Disk Manager shows it as an unallocated disk.

i looked at it in partition magic but couldn't find a way to restore the table or anything like that. I reeeeeeeeeeeally need this drive to remain intact, as it has all of my backup drive images (there is no backup image of this drive, grrrrrrrrr).

Is there a way that I can restore the partition information without formatting the drive?

1/20/2006 2:50:32 AM

Check out Partition Table Doctor. The demo will also you to see what the program would do without actually applying the changes. If you can find a way around the demo, more power to you. Last time I looked (fallish?), there wasn't anything that could do that.

1/20/2006 6:16:55 AM

welp, that worked. thx

1/20/2006 11:42:25 PM

yeah partition table doctor has saved my ass a couple times.

1/21/2006 3:00:53 AM

knoppix has a decent partition manager too

1/21/2006 3:19:46 AM

hehe, I knew from a similar episode a couple years ago that the moment something stupid like that happens, don't do ANYTHING ELSE to the hard drive until you get the software to fix it. saved my ass quite nicely

1/22/2006 3:32:43 PM

On close to the same topic, we got my grandfather a 300 gig HD for Christmas this year. He's trying to install it on a Win98 computer, which when he plugged it in said it would format it for only up to 138 gigs. How can he get around this to use the whole thing? Just partition it as 3 drives or is there another tool that can do the whole thing on 1 300 gig drive.

1/22/2006 4:50:25 PM

i think he'll have to partition it into 3 drives

1/22/2006 5:16:25 PM

^^
Depends on whether the BIOS will recognize a HD that large on a computer that old. Get the motherboard name/model for that computer, and check if the latest BIOS revision will accept something that large. Worry about the OS after that

1/22/2006 9:44:50 PM