I searched for similar threads and found a few, but not similar enough...

I tried installing Xubuntu on an XP machine, and it seems the different
partitioning programs I used don't play well together.

The hard drive is a 300 Gb IDE drive, originally partitioned into C: (WinXP OS; 60 Gb), D:\ (Data partition; 120 Gb) and a large contiguous section of unallocated space.

I used PartitionMagic 8.0 to

resize the D: partition to 80 Gb
create ext3 partition
create swap partition

Then I ran the Xubuntu install disk.

It decided to take the ext3 parition and create both an ext3 partiton and a swap partition THERE.

The Xubuntu install completed ok and booted ok.

I then booted WindowsXP and used the built in local storage console to delete the unused partitions left over (the swap partition I created with PartitionMagic)

I booted WinXP again and it reported that the D:\ partition (with all the user's DATA!!!)was not formatted, did I want to format?

The built-in local storage management console in XP reports the D:\ partition is healthy, and of the correct size, but when I use Windows Explorer or DOS command line to try to inspect it, no luck!

The XP GUI Properties for the D drive say 0 bytes, RAW format...

PartitionMagic 8.0 fails on startup with error 117 (can't determine the drive letter)

I've run the PartInfo utility in PartitonMagic and it reports strange
values in the partition table and MBR. (multiple instances of "x expected, y found" -- I have no idea what the correct values should be)

I'm thinking if I just knew what to change/correct, I could manually edit the partition table (and MBR?) to the correct values and XP would again recognize the drive.

Should I edit these unusual values with the "expected" value reported by PartInfo? I'm afraid to make any unrecoverable mistakes here...

I DON'T want to re-format the D: partition and lose all the user's data in the process (they backed up MOST of it, but you know, I don't want to resemble an idiot too closely).

Can anyone provide some suggestions for recovering this partition's data successfully?

This has nothing to see with Linux (Ubuntu).

It looks more like a Windos problem.

Windows uses relative addressing for partitions. The first partition it encounters is C, the next is D, and so on. When you add or delete partitions you may change the relative address of existing partitions. For example, If you have partitions c,d, and e and then delete d the old e partition will become d since it is now the second partition encountered.

So you need to draw a few charts to keep track of the old and new relative names of your partitions as you add and delete partitions.

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Steve Stites

Use gparted or parted magic do do it with.

http://partedmagic.com/

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Some info on using gparted.

http://wiki.partedmagic.com/index.php/Using_GParted