big hard drive problem

[BVV]

Somehow I completely lost access to the D drive, it's gone.
Originally things were like this:
C: 5 Gb
D: 15 Gb
E: burner
F: CD rom

Now:
C: about 11 Gb ( which is the same size this drive had when I bought the computer)
D: burner
E: Cd rom

Partitionmagic "recognizes" the problem, but it won't start because of it. So there is no way I can get back to the original state. D was my backup drive, fortunately about 90% of the data I also have on cd.

Formatting the drive and reinstalling Windows doesn't help.
How can I get back the rest of the drive? Someone told me I could use FDISK before formatting, but I don't know how to do this. What should I do?

[FortiTude]

i think somehow the partition table of your hd got corrupted so it now uses an backup version with the old settings.
your data should still be there if nothing was written on the parts of your old D partition.

the only way to solve this is to change your partition table manually with a tool called ptedit, included with partition magic. but it only helps if you know the exact sectors of your old partitions.

i had a similar problem some time ago, i was resizing and moving my partitions with pm but my pc crashed during that operation and it used an old partition table as backup. fortunately i remembered the exact KB values i entered for my partitions so i could enter these values into partition magic and could look for the sectors, heads,... (i didn't apply the changes, it was just for getting the values) the i entered the values into ptedit and my 45 gig data partition with much good stuff on it reappeared ... i can't decribe the feeling .. i was so glad ! as i didn't have any backup of all the data.

don't try something like this if you are not sure what you are doing or not sure about the values !

forti

ps wondering why my light flackers again and again during the last half an hour ... i hope i got a good stablilized power supply ...

[Duracell]

yes, FortiTude is rigth;
always store a paper hard copy like this pic below on a save place;

a last chance, you can try Acronis Recovery Expert;
maybe it could detect the real MFT;
_http://acronis.com


Greetings from Duracell
Duracell