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Partition problem

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by mpol1

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Greetings!

I had a drive with two Fat32 partitions. With Partition Magic, I tried to "mesh" them into one. I made the mistake of stopping the operation in mid-action, and, after a reboot and after Partition Magic tried to recover the lost partition I ended up with one in Fat 32 (unchanged and working), and the other one as FF (hex) Xenix BBT. What is that and what can I do with it? How can I return it to Fat 32? Is it possible?
Thanks for your help.

Michel

14 replies

by mpol1

Greetings again!

BTW, this all happened under Win2000 sp2.
I don't know whether this is significant!

Michel

by gnix4

Just curious, but have you tried an fdisk out of DOS? I just recently had a dual boot (Win98 and Win2K), but decided to go back to a single drive (Wife liked it better..), I was running into some trouble also using a third-party utility, until I decided to use fdisk, worked great! Your options are right there and I partitioned out two 20gb sections.

Hope that helps a little.

by curlergirl

If you are unable to recover the partition through Partition Magic, I don't think you'll be able to recover it at all. You can, of course, completely delete the partition, re-create it as FAT32 and then restore it from a backup, but that's the onlyway to recover it as far as I can see. If Win2K won't allow you to delete the partition, you can try using a DOS 6.22 boot disk and run Fdisk - this will probably see the partition as a "Non-DOS" partition and allow you to delete it completely. Hope this helps!

by ronypp

There is a DISC Wizard for Seagate HDD. Have you tried it, with that you can do a low level format and then partition it to FAT32.

If you have any data in the HDD that you need to backup, then there is a utility called active partition. You can use this utility to view the HDD corrupted partition or the data in the partition that were removed accidently..But if you have formatted the HDD, then it won't work.It costs about $30.

Let me know whether you need the disc wizard. I can send it as a .zip file. you can unzip into a floppy and boot the system by the floppy and do the format.

Regards

Rony

rony@india.com

by mpol1

Thanks RonyPP for the suggestion.
I have looked at the Active Partition website, and they do mention the ability to recover lost data on corrupted FAT32 or NTFS partition.
But I no longer have that!
According to Partition Magic, it's a "FF (hex) Xenix BBT" partition, which PM seem only able to format or delete, but not convert (back to Fat32 in this case!)!!
What in the world is "FF (hex) Xenix BBT", and what does it do???

Michel

by nofei1

My sympathy to you, Michel.
Ihave been using System Commander 2000 with more features and power than Partition Magic.
Forget the hex-wingdings and install SC 2000
on the same drive. Hardly taking any space, this utility will show you graphically the structure of your drive in color and all the partitions present, even if in different formats.(In fact, I have used it successfully for multi-booting 98/ME/2000 etc on the same drive.)
I'd bet this is your best surgery tool for your plight.
Contact me for further help if need be.
Best wishes.
Nana Ofei.

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