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Partition Magic crashed. Recovery with R-Studio

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2010 3:55 am
by Micha
Hello,

I wanted to change the size of my data partition using Partition Magic 8 under XP SP3. When the progress bar was at about 14% the PC crashed. Since then I'm not able to access the drive under Windows.

I installed R-Studio and analyzed the partition. Now I can see the folder structure and the files, even with their correct name. But when I recover files (<64kB) many of them are broken. When I open those files with a hex editor the beginnings of the files seem ok, but in the end I can see content form other files, e.g. email content at the end of an Eagle schematic (*.sch). Opening of such files fails with an error message from the corresponding programme.

Is there any setting I must consider or any other trick I could try? I don't want to purchase the software before I see a further chance of success

Best regards,
Michael

Re: Partition Magic crashed. Recovery with R-Studio

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2010 7:18 am
by Alt
I give you my sympathy.
This is probably the worst data recovery case. PM had already changed the data describing where the new places for files were, but didn't actually moved the files to the new places. That's why you see the correct folder structure with correct file names, but those files point to incorrect places on the disk and the files appear to be broken. And files appear to be fragmented.
See File recovery FAQ.

Re: Partition Magic crashed. Recovery with R-Studio

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2010 10:57 am
by Micha
Do you know how PM moves files?
Does it copy them just from one location to another with an offset (and keep fragmentation as it is), or does it swap segments and kind of defragment data at the same time?
Does it change the whole MFT at the beginning of the operation or does ist change just the entry of the file on which it's working at the moment?

Re: Partition Magic crashed. Recovery with R-Studio

Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 6:12 am
by Alt
The answer is simple: I don't know. They don't publish the details on how it works.
The result is quite simple: PM and other disk management software are the worst enemies of data.