Hey Gang, I'm Mike, and I'm new :-) However, I've browsed the forums here fairly often when looking for fixes for other problems I've had in the past. Figured it was about time to sign up and get some help :-)

So, my desktop has 2 drives, one is partitioned into C and D, the second is E and is used only for page file.

Last night I got the grand idea that I should recombine drive C and D into a single drive, so I used Partition Magic 8 (installed on Drive D) and first matched the sector sizes of C and D. This went off without a hitch.

Next I tried to merge C and D ~ where D becomes a folder inside C. This did not go well at all. It errored out in the middle of the process (probably when PM8 tried to stuff itself into a folder - Not my best idea, in hindsight).

Now I have a folder "D_DRIVE" that has no contents, and the computer does not show / recognize that there is a D drive. However, the C drive is still the same size ~ it does not appear to have actually "absorbed" the D drive.

Can you guys give me an idea of what I should try in order to reverse my poor decision?

Thanks in advance,

Mike B.

If you open the Windows XP partition manager (If I remember correctly you can access it by... Start > Control Panel > Services >Disk management ) It sounds like that the D partition was deleted and that it may now be marked as unallocated space, also right click on the C drive in my computer and check the volume for errors, also running chkdsk wouldn't hurt.

(Start > Run, type in "cmd" and press enter, when the prompt is open type in chkdsk /r and it will prompt you that it is use and cannot be checked or something like that, say yes to scan it on the next reboot. Then reboot. )


After that if its still no good go back to the partition manager and if you still see the space for drive D marked as unallocated then it sounds like its lost. Your best bet would be to reformat that unallocated space (Use NTFS when it asks for a file system) and create a recovery back up onto that partition.


Also if you get the wise idea to combine them, I don't think you can use the recovery tools in the merged partition.