BleepingComputer.com: Corrupt Partition After Partition Split

Hi Everyone,

On my newly built computer, I forgot to partition it when I was installing Vista.

Today I decided I wanted to create a a few partitions on it. As I've used Acronis Disk Director Suite before and it worked, I tried using it on this computer.

I set the operation to take 80GB out of the current 232GB on the primary partition and make a new partition with those 80GB.

However while the program was doing its thing, it said "unable to read sector". (This is a new hard drive by the way). Retrying did not help, so the only thing I could do was "Ignore" (there was no cancel function).

Afterward I rebooted the machine, but now it says "Disk error - Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

I tried booting from my Vista DVD, but going into the repair options, it could not even find my install.

Things got worse when i tried to use a Live CD to view the HD structure. It said the C partition was "corrupt and unreadable", while the D partition was "not formatted".

I tried using the Acronis DIsk Director Suite "Recover Partitions" function but it did not work.


Is there anything else I can do before I have to re-format & reinstall Vista?

Thanks to all in advance!

Hello Tim,

I used this tool http://www.ptdd.com/ to recover a deleted partition on my external drive, sadly the software is not free, but it worked very well. The drive would need to be hooked up to another computer to use the software.

You could use http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download to create a Linux live CD that might have some luck getting in to your partition to recover the files then reformat.

Does this mean that I will probably have to re-install vista whether I can recover the data or not?

Since this is a new computer (which you helped me pick out ;) ) it doesn't have any data I need on it.

Also do you have any idea what might have gone wrong which caused the partition to become corrupt?

Thanks a lot!

Take a look here.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=p...amp;btnG=Search

If there is nothing on the system at all, I would just reformat and reinstall the OS. Partitions are very fragile, any number of things could have happened.

thanks!

also would you have any HD backup programs to recommend to prevent problems like this in the future?

There are many programs on the market that can do a good job, I don't really have a preference you could try different programs to see which one suits your needs best. http://clonezilla.org/ is quite good, but my backup solution is to store data on an external hard drive.

Thanks a lot for your help, my apologies for the late response.

No problem, glad to help.