Partition Magic Rescue Disks

Is there anyone out there who has had experience using Partition Magic Rescue Disks to save data off a drive that needs to be repartitioned. Other suggestions of saving the data by other means would be appreciated also.
I have the disks, but don't know how to use them.

 

Partition Magic Rescue Disks

I do not know about those but if they are anywhere near the same as McAfee and Norton Rescue disks they would not be safe to use AFTER the repartioning. As they would put everyting back ( BIOS/CMOS, Master Boot Record, Partition info etc. the way it was before the changes.

And very possibley make the machine unbootable.

After making the mentioned changes new Rescue Disks would need to be made that would refect those changes.

Can't you use PM to repartition without losing data ? That is what it us designed for.

BillyBob

 

Barry

Your Partition Magic program has a help file that explains all about the Rescue Disks. Help>about the features> create rescue disks.

The rescue disks are made so that you can run PM in DOS if you can't boot into windows.

 

Bill,
Have you ever actually used Partition Magic? Someone else provided me with the Rescue Disks. I don't have the primary program to explore the help offered. Do I just insert the disks when I get to A:\? What do I type to get them to start working?
Barry

 

DO NOT USE

They are not made from or for your machine.

There is a possibility of KILLING your machine.

Further CAUTION.

DO NOT USE ANY rescue disks that were made on another machine.

The only Rescue Diisks that are safe to use are ones such as Norton AV Rescue disks AND THEN FOR THE AV CHECKING ONLY


BillyBob

 

Barry, It's alright to use Partition magic Rescue Disks made from another machine since they do not contain information about the other machine. They are merely a DOS version of the PM program that will allow you to run it in DOS mode when needed.

There are occasions when you need to do this and it's all explained in the Help files as Bmoore1129 stated. If you don't have those help files available, perhaps you should consider buying the full program.

Cheers.

 

Again the California kid is right on. A better name for these would be "Parition magic dos" boot disks.

But the help is available on the Powerquest site!

Mike

 

Greetings from Atlanta Georgia

I am not on my own machine of course and having a few proplems so please bear with me.

Again the California kid is right on. A better name for these would be "Parition magic dos" boot disks.

I AGREE. That is all they are. They boot to DOS and have the DOS version of PM.

That is why I wrote what I did. I do not consider them to be Rescue disks.

Main problem here is" TERMONOLIGY "

The PM DOS Boot disks are OK to use.

BillyBob

 

Hehehe, Ho Ho Ho ....... terminology huh?

 

I couldn't find the help on their website, so I decided to get the entire program. I hope that, when I can get around to it, I can figure out how to use this program to partition an inaccessible drive without losing any data. If anyone has used this program for this purpose, please share your experiences. I'm downloading it onto my 30gb drive and will use it to save my 40gb drive.

 

Yes I have used it thru several versions. Very stright forward.

Mike

 

Ditto on that. Both Partition Manager and Drive Image are excellent programs.

 

Just ran accross your post.

I was a complete novice as far as Partition Magic when I got the program. I had no problem running it after reading only a few pages in the Help section.

You can accomplish your goal one of two ways. The easiest is to Install PM. Turn off all programs that are running in the background. Anti-Virus, Firewall & etc. Also, Ctrl+Alt+Del & end task on everything except Explorer, and system tray.

Open PM. Read the help section on partitioning.

Then resize your C drive first. Note the amount of MB you have currently in use on C, then re-size C, adding aditional space to the actual size of the contents of the drive if you think it necessary, which it won't hurt to do. Be sure you tell it to use FAT32 on each partition you make if you're running 98 or 98SE.

Then make additional logical partitions out of the rest of the drive, giving each partition a name if you wish. Partition the drive the way you want it, making each logical partition considerably larger than the total of the files you want to keep on it so as to have room for more. The computer will give each one a drive letter anyway, but I named each of mine too. I don't let Drivemapper do it's thing. I just re-boot & let the computer recognize the new partitions. Do a thorough Scandisk of each partition, telling Scandisk to scan system & data areas, and to automatically fix errors. This will take a lot of time, but should be done before transfering any data to them. Then cut & transfer data from the Primary OS partiton to the logicals.

Make your own PM rescue disks.

Later you can check the size of the clusters on the partitions from within PM. If any are larger than 4 or 8KB, you'll want to resize those clusters to avoid a lot of wasted space with file storage.

One thing PM cannot do, as far as I know, is separate your data the way you want it separated. It will separate the drive at certain cylinders, sectors, and etc., but will give no regard to what files are on that section of the drive, so therefore data would be moved into each new partition, but not in the particular way you'd like. So that is why you re-size the C drive to accomadate the files already on the computer. Hopefully you don't have a really large amount of files to contend with on C. If you do, then a different manner of accomplishing this may be necessary, so as not to have a C Primary partition that is way too large that you may want to size down later.

As an aditional precaution, I would back up the data that I wanted to transfer to a new partition onto CD's. Better safe than sorry. In addition to being safe, if a different method of doing this seems necessary, you will have already backed up the stuff you want to keep.

All of this beats trying to partition in DOS yourself before installing the OS. I have partitioned, re-sized & done a little bit of everything to the partitions on my slave drive & main drive both with it, while the data is still on it, but caution has to be used when doing that. You must make a partition coincide with, or bigger than the total size of the data contained on it, if you're moving stuff around with data still on them.

One Suggestion I would have is once you get everything set up the way you want all of it, is to get Drive Image & make back-up images of everything you truly want to save. Mainly your OS with all the programs installed on it that you want. It sure beats re-installing everything when you need to replace the OS. I back-up regular data stuff on CD's with a regular burning program & use Drive Image to back up my OS's.

Drive image will restore an OS image to the hard drive from a CD as if it had never been lost. Of course, new images should be made regularly if you do a lot of installing & un-installing, as long as the OS is working good. Be sure to make the Drive Image floppy disk, so that if necessary (a crash event), Drive Image can be run in DOS from the floppy to do a restore. Drive Image is not as easy to learn to operate as Partition Magic, though, so you will have to play with it.

I am assuming you don't have XP when I say DOS.

Don't know if I've helped any, or just confirmed my own stupidity, but that's the way I did it on my old hard drive after I installed it as my slave drive. The same thing can be done extactly the same way on your main drive.

 

Thanks Deloris,
I still haven't had time to install and read the PM, but I'm not sure if what you were telling me has to do with my problem. One drive had an Explorer fault that wouldn't let me access my desktop. Then, something happened that wouldn't even allow me to access that drive. It tells me that it can't be found, then says I need to FAT32 partition it. I am looking to save the data on that drive. I'll need to install PM on my other drive then use it to partition the bad drive. I'm not sure if your instructions addressed that problem.
Barry

 

Wait just a cotton pickin minute here!

What is this about Explorer fault and desktop access?

Barry do you have another thread somewhere?

Exactly what led to this intrest in Partition magic and what do you expect it will do for you?

If you have boot problems don't you want to try to fix that?????????????

Mike

 

After the December Microsoft Windows 98 update, I no longer had accesss to my drive. Before the desktop appeared, I would get the message that Explorer has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. (Explorer caused an invalid page fault in module EXPLORER.EXE at 015F: 00401f31). If I booted from floppy, it got through preparing Windows 98 setup wizard, then gave me the setup detection message: Message SU0013 -- Set up cannot create files on your start up drive and cannot set up Windows 98). Soon after, I couldn't even get that. It didn't detect a primary master. It said that Windows 98 has detected that the drive does not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition. That is what led me to look to Partition Magic, so I could partition the drive and not lose the data on it. Am I heading in the wrong direction?
Barry

 

Hello again,

I'm with mflynn. You didn't mention the Explorer fault in your original post. Now it is obvious to us that you are having a boot up problem, but wasn't obvious before. That, I have never had any experience with as of yet. Knock on wood, if I can find any REAL wood.

Do you have two hard drives? Another one that has an OS on it & it will boot, & they're on the same ribbon? If so, swap the jumpers on each one & use the good drive to try to access the other drive & try and retrieve info off of the other one. Hopefully you can.

If you don't have another HD, then you may need to try a third party retrieval program of some kind. What one I don't know, since you can't boot the drive, but I think there are some that will run from the floppy. Not sure though. Maybe even those PM rescue disks would do it, but I don't know for sure. I haven't had to try them. I am afraid I can't help as I've not had this problem myself.


If you don't have another hard drive to use, & those rescue disks won't do what you want to do, then the only recourse that I can see is re-format & begin again.

As for my instructions about partition magic, I thought you were just wanting to partition your hard drive for using in a particular way. If you install PM on a good drive that has a working OS on it, & fix it to be the bootable drive, PM will also explore the contents of other drives, and if there are any contents, those contents can be copied with Partition Magic to a good drive.

Partition Magic can be installed on an extra good bootable drive & used to partition the bad one too. It would be wise to re-format the bad one first though, before partitioning it for use.

PM is a marvelous tool. It and Drive Image both. I don't know how I ever got along without them.

Sorry about the misunderstanding. Hopefully I haven't confused you, or myself, any further.

 

Thanks Deloris,
I do have two drives on my computer. My 30GB is working fine. That is what I am using right now. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to access my 40GB drive through my 30GB. It doesn't seem to be able to detect it, then says it doesn't contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition.
Barry

 

OK Barry

Been away.

Yes I will go into it with you. But is too late tonight! 12:35 am.

But I will leave you with a couple of questions.

Was the 40G originally you main drive?

Have you since moved it to be a secondary master or slaved to another HD?

If you made it a slave did you change any jumpers on the drive?

Is it even attached to the controller now?

If so boot to dos with a floppy run fdisk and tell us what it shows.

Does dos see this drive? c: d: e: etc? if so can you see the data on the drive that windows don't see?

When it boots do you see the drive as the BIOS posts?

I will check in in the morning.

Mike

 

OK.

Do what he said first. After he's helped, if the OS still won't see the other drive, then you might want to try this. It can't hurt, because if PM don't see the other drive, then you won't be able to do anything to it with PM anyway.

If you have a fully working copy of Partition Magic, try installing it on the 30GB one. Re-boot the system to the 30 to update system files. Re-boot may not be necessary, but I did it anyway. Open PM. Then look to see if PM will see the 40GB hard drive. If it does, you will see two sets of particulars. One set will be for Drive 1, & the other set will be for Drive 2. Drive 1 being the one you are booted to. Drive 2 being the other one. Once you've done this, read some of the help stuff about converting drives to FAT 32.

On Drive #2, highlight C. From the left pane click on Convert Partition. In the pop up, tell PM to convert C to FAT 32. The Primary dot is probably browned out, but DON'T put a dot in the logical spot. You want it to stay a Primary. Hit OK, then go down & click on the Green Apply button to activate the procedure. If C is comprised of the entire 40GB, this may take awhile. If it is in it's own smaller partition, it won't take very long.

Hope this can help in some way. If it doesn't, then back to square one.