HughR

One of our teachers brought in an unusable portable 120GB HD (2.5"). It was not backed up and there is about 2 years worth of work stored on it. I have analysed the drive with several utilities and until I tried Testdisk was getting nothing usful from it. Testdisk did a deep scan and found that the FAT had been deleted/corrupted somehow, but a backup had been found in a restore folder. All the scans I've done so far are non-invasive as I don't want to risk overwriting anything; can anyone tell me if by restoring the FAT are we likely to lose any data - if so how much - I'm guessing not a lot. I have tried cloning (using Clonezilla) it to an equal sized partition on another drive so I can do a dry-run, but without the FAT, nothing (apart from Testdisk) has been able to read it to clone it.

I tried GParted today and it worked perfectly. Absolutely fantastic. I will try Diskpart next time and see how that goes, it's useful that it's part of Windows and you don't need a CD as with GParted. The GParted disc will be filed in my 'useful stuff to keep' drawer for future use. Thank you all for your suggestions!

Thanks for all your feedback - I'm looking into Gparted at the moment - though I'm a little nervous about Linux, I have had no exposure to this at all. 'Partition Commander' unfortunately costs and cost is a definite barrier, although I do feel that some form of partition tool/s would be beneficial. I considered ghosting the drive and repartitioning - but there's no software, apart from a facility in an imaging utility, for that either! I was aware of Diskpart but the command line aspect shelved it for me for the time being. I'll review this if I have no luck with Gparted. Thanks for all your help and the rapid responses - I'll let you know how I go on.

Hi this is my first post on the forum, and my first week in this job! Sorry if it's a noob question - or in the wrong place, but I have searched elsewhere and here (without success) for a similar post. We have a number of laptops running XP Pro SP2 which were provided pre-partitioned with the primary partition in NTFS and the second partition as FAT32, C: and D: respectively. The partition sizes are 12.9GB each. Most users are not aware of the existence of the second partition and as a result the primary partition fills rapidly and the second partition remains unused. I would like to delete the second partition and expand the NTFS primary partition to fill the unallocated void. This can be done fairly easily using Partition Magic but the school don't have this and are unlikely to pay for it. Is there any practical way of doing this without using Partition Magic? Thanks.