Partition magic 8.0 merge erro

[Aetesu]

I recently tried to merge two partitions with partition magic and now one partition is inaccessible and the other has missing files. I've tried a few different partition recovery programs and none have worked. I've tried to use Partition magic to check for errors but it gives me a message: "Error #7 operation canceled by user" I can't find any reference to this error. In the error box is has error #501, Cross-linked files were found. I've read how to fix this error but chkdisk doesn't work because it doesn't recognize the drive as a winxp drive. Also somehow that drive was converted from NTFS to FAT32. I also got error 2002 when I tried to fix the problem. My computer is also considerably slower now. It also created an extended drive which I assume was supposed to be the single drive after the merging. Does anyone know what I can do to fix this?
Thanks,
Erik

[johnny_quest]

I've always had trouble with partitionmagic when trying to work with data in partitions... but its awesome for setting up blank drives and such...

that's why partition magic even warns you many times to backup your data before proceeding!

You can try Zero Assumption Recovery, it worked recently for me on a bad usb jump drive, but i'm sure you're going to lose a lot of files regardless of whatever you use.

I would recover what I could, burn it to a DVD, repartition/format the drive the way you want, then copy everything back.

[Paul Komski]

Some more specific info could be helpful. You could download PartInfo (ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PartInNT.zip) from the symantec site, unzip and run it and post the results back here.

In particular do you have any available accessible and free disk space on the current drive. If not and your data is valuable then it is worth slaving the whole drive to another PC and attempting recovery of files that way. Peeps here have had a great deal of success with GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org) (for FAT or NTFS as appropriate) as long as the drive is accessible and the data has not been overwritten.

[Sylvander]

I made a nice bootable floppy that is really easily made using a self-extracting image [the exe file makes the floppy] and inlcudes...

1. ptedit
2. partinfo
3. edit.com
4. DOS prompt [really useful for running other progs on a floppy that isn't bootable]

A menu is displayed and you hit 1,2,3, or 4 as you like.
If you run partinfo, when shut down it automatically uses edit.com to save the data to the info.txt file on the floppy.

See how to make it HERE (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=52472&highlight=partinfo).