after Disk Director crashed, partition disappeared
Hello
I have a HDD with 3 partitions.
Today I was creating a 4th partition using the free space from the main one, C, with Win7 on it. So I used Disk Director 2011 on Windows 7, used the "Divide" function to get some space from C partition and create the new one. The software asked me to reboot the machine, so I accepted. When it reboot, there were many errors (I couldn't note them, they were too fast) and at the end the system reboot again, and now I can't boot Windows. Furthermore the partition is now damaged: no filesystem found, it wants to be formatted, not able to find files inside it using Live CDs and other tools like Testdisk and such.
Using the Recovery tool inside Disk Director boot cd isn't helping at all..
How can I get back my files?
thanks and sorry for my bad english, I hope the problem is clear
"reboot" procedures isn't recommended??? then why DD software asked me to do that?
If someone would ask me now to recommend something, I won't never recommend DD after what it did to my system.
It asks to reboot because it can't do the requested operation while Windows is running. The problem is that when it reboots it's running DD in automatic mode -- you have no control over the procedure. DD is usually performing many operations to get to the end result and if something isn't detected properly or there's a problem the procedure can cause further problems or data loss.
It's generally recommended (and definately recommended by me) to do these types of procedures manually by booting to the DD CD. This allows you control over each step and gives you the best chance of success. It's also strongly recommend creating a backup of the entire drive before making changes. I've tried to get Acronis to make this caution more prominent, but they haven't. My hope was that people would take it seriously and create a backup. If they didn't then at least they knew about the risk.
There is always the risk of data loss when making partitioning changes. This is true regardless of the partitioning software being used and is not limited to Acronis software. Most people have no idea what's being changed or moved behind the scenes. For example, you were creating fourth partition from space on C:, which is probably the first or second partition. DD would have to resize C: smaller, move the inbetween partition(s), and then create the new partition. This operation could involve every partition on the drive meaning that every partition is at risk. This is why I recommend backing up the entire drive before making changes.
Mudcrab,
Do you think running the recovery CD and selecting recover partitions might work?
The partition(s) would have to be deleted first and then the recovery would most likely find those instead of the originals. I suppose it could be tried, but I wouldn't hold out much hope of success.