Vista corrupted my drive

[Aparajith]

Hi guys,

I have a 164 GB Sata 2 HDD with following partitions :

C : 20 GB NTFS - Primary, Active - XP SP2 installed
D : 10 GB NTFS - Primary - Vista Installed
E : 15 GB FAT32 - Primary - Dump
F : 20 GB FAT32 - Logical -
G : 20 GB FAT32 - Logical -
H : 25 GB FAT32 - Logical -
I : 25 GB FAT32 - Logical -

Since I found that 10 GB was too less for Vista, I thought of combining drives D: and E: . But on doing so using Windows Vista Storage manager, it crashed and rebooted. When my machine rebooted, I was unable to boot into Windows Vista and it was giving me an error about corrupted MBR. Now all my logical drives and 1 primary drive ( e: ) is shown together with 115 GB as RAW. I have all important documents. How do I recover the partitions. I will try Acronis Rescue DISK, but am not sure of its effectiveness. Any other bright ideas and suggestions guys.

P.S : Am able to boot into XP and install Vista which shows the rest opf the drives as 1 single unformatted RAW Drive, but I dont have any applications or My Documents or any other drives shown. I will also be installing Vista on D: and see if anything is possible.

Just help me out guys,

Aparajith .S

[QwertyManiac]

Combining a system drive with another while running an OS on the same is disastrous! You can try some good recovery tools (Check below for similar threads to get some other popular names) and hope for the best. Don't fiddle around with it much, else you might lose the possibly retained data there too.

[Aparajith]

Hi everyone,

I managed to recover all the data and also repartition, merge drives according to my wish and will. Thanks only to one fabulous software, two actually : Acronis Disk Director 10 and its recovery disk, Paragon partition manager. Now both XP SP2 and Vista are up and running with HALO 2 and all my My Docs, Pics and stuff....Thank god. Though it was a long harrowing wait for Acronis to search my full hard-disk and recover all the data, it was worth all the wait.

Aparajith .S

[QwertyManiac]

Good to know its fixed again. Be careful next time

[vish786]

for what did u use paragon partition manager ? for partitioning or for recovery, and acronis itself can do partitioning and recovery then y did u use paragon partition manager.... didnt acronis solve ur problem ?

[Aparajith]

I used Acronis for recovering data and partitions. As far as I know, Acronis has no options for merging partitions which Paragon offers. So I used both softwares...

Aparajith .S