Lost bootability and readability during a Merge partitions attempt

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I have a striped hardware SATA raid that I previously broke into 4 partitions several years ago. All was well. Now I wanted to put them back together before I migrated everything to a mirrored harddrive, so I started by trying to merge the bootable partition and the next one together. There were errors and it shut down and wouldn't boot anymore. I went ahead and installed XP onto a PATA drive so I could use it to look into the SATA raid from within XP. I saw nothing available. I booted with Acronis bootable CD and found the SATA and partitions. The previously bootable partition looks to be empty and about 60GB. The other partion was not merged, and it is about 20GB smaller (left about 10GB). It looked completely full and I could look at what was in there and go up and down through the directories and subdirectories. I have never had any problems with DD11, so I didn't do a recent backup. Since I can see it, can I get to it another way and work with it?

mar 28/02/2012 - 16:09
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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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For anyone reading this, I can't stress enough how important it is to create an Entire Disk Image backup before making partitioning changes, ESPECIALLY if the Merge or Split feature will be used.

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You can look at the drive using data recovery software and see if you can get anything off. A user recently reported success by using DMDE.

In most cases, the partitions are not left in a usable state when a Merge or Split function fails. It's much safer to do the procedures manually so you have control over them.

mar 28/02/2012 - 19:22
truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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You MudCrab, of course, are exactly correct; backup before you mess with the partitions. BUT, it is a bit of a testimony that this is the first time that I had trouble with Disk Director. I think that DD is an excellent piece of software along with True Image. They make a great team with the Plus Pack. I like that it is getting more refined as time goes on. By the way, I used GetDataBack Recovery Software to get in and play with the bad partitions. I have used it before and it works great. Lifetime updates is a great plus for this as well. Just keep you name and key, then you can download the newest version when you need it since you don't usually need it to often. I love to play around trying to get computers to do more stuff.

mar 28/02/2012 - 22:21