Using an external USB HDD, I was able to move ALL my data off the Dell with the LINUX SLAX boot cd! This is a life saver - even if I have to re-image my Dell back to factory new and spend two weeks loading OS updates and applications. I will spend some hours playing with this tonight - but this is the closest I've come to seeing my data since Norton Disk Doctor hosed me on Friday night! except that I can't seem to copy it or move it off the drive to the CD Rom. I know nothing about LINUX - but running the 'startx' shell - which I guess is a Windows-like GUI, it appears I have access to my data on my HDD. I did check it out, and burned a CD with SLAX, from which I booted my Dell Laptop. I HAVE VALUABLE DATA ON THIS LAPTOP THAT IS NOT YET BACKED UP AND CAN NOT BE REPLACED - I REALLY NEED HELP.īeing new to this forum - I thought that link was somehow referring back to my original post. The PM manual indicates it is possible to manually edit the partition table to recover my data I presume this would be via the PTEDIT.EXE tool. I have the text dump from PartInfo.exe and attached it to this post. I ran PARTINFO.EXE from the DOS disks and see that in fact, Norton Disk Doctor screwed up the partition tables. Searching the PM manual, it seems this error is from overlapping partitions. I am able to boot from these floppies and when PM runs in DOS mode, it reports ERROR #113. I do have the PM 8.0 Rescue Disks from when I first installed and ran PM on this Dell. The primary bootable NTFS partition was drive C: It does not show up as drive C:, or D:, etc. Regardless of attempting to boot normally, into SAFE mode, into 'The Last Good Configuration', or from the Dell Windows XP CD - the machine displays a Windows STOP ERROR screen with the ERROR CODE 0x000000CA.ĭell's technical support confirms they place a hidden DOS partition of 23.5 MB with various utilities on the drive, but it is normally not visible. From that point on, my laptop will not boot.

Disk Doctor did something - then rebooted my laptop. Disk Doctor asked if I wanted to make the partition accessible - and I mistakenly said YES. After it ran, I ran Norton Disk Doctor (Norton System Works 2004) - which reported finding a 23.5MB DOS Partition that was 'inaccessible'. I ran PM 8.0.1 on my Dell Inspiron E1505 (Win XP Media Edition, 2005) laptop when it was new, back in Oct-06 to optimize the default partitions. PLEASE HELP !! I've spent over 4 hours on the phone today with Symantec's Customer non-Support and never spoke to anyone with a clue about Partition Magic - the product they bought from PowerQuest.

Partition magic 8.0 os compatibility