Question:

How can I restore a previous partition table on 320gb hard drive?

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It was working fine at 320 gigs on a winXP system which died and I then installed it without changes as a slave on a winME system with a slightly older motherboard. Apparently the BIOS on the older board did not support drives larger than 128 gigs, because some directories were not accessible (showed as gibberish folder and file names that were un-openable) but a decent amount of the data was still available. I copied what I could to another drive just to be safe.

So far so good, because I figured to just drop the drive back into an XP system which I know supports large capacity disks, but when I did that the drive is now showing up as an unformatted 127 gig drive. Yikes! It looks like the winME system wrote a new partition table to the MBR on this disk.

Any ideas on how to fix this without data loss? To the best of my knowledge no changes were made to any directory structures or data files while it was on the older machine, so I really didn't think this would be a problem. I'm currently exploring what can be done with a commercial data recovery app called Zero Assumption Recovery which I've used successfully in the past but so far it thinks the drive is 127 gigs also.

It won't be the end of the world if I can't recover but it would be very annoying. Any help appreciated, thanks for looking.

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2 ANSWERS


  1. Download " Hirens Boot CD " burn to CD and boot from it it can repair MBR and also has Partition magic on it so if you want to you can do both jobs


  2. buy the program "Partition Magic". i had a similar problem before and this is the trick your looking for. it lets you resize partitions with the click of a button on any drive detected on the computer.  

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