Paragon Partition Manager erased one of my partitions!
Welcome back!
Looking at the title of this post, would you care to venture a guess as to what my mood is like right now? Here are the details about what happened, since you asked. Didn’t ask? Sure you did. Shut up and read.
I found this tutorial explaining how to dual boot linux and XP when XP is already installed. Reading through the various comments, I discovered that the author was very helpful and willing to assist with problems and questions. A question about moving partitions in order to make room for linux garnered a response that included a link to Paragon Partition Manager.
My first mistake was downloading that program. My second mistake was in running the setup utility for that program. My third, and biggest, mistake was in trying to USE that program.
I told it to take 1024K away from the last partition on the drive, move the partition to the end of the drive, take 500K off the next to last partition, move that partition over so it was up against the last partition, and so on, rather like giving every partition a dose of virtual Fenphedra, until the end result would be a 10.5Gigabyte expanse of unallocated space right next to my primary partition where I could install Ubuntu.
I stacked all these operations in its queue and went to bed because this was probably going to take several hours and it was already almost midnight. When I woke up this morning, I discovered that my E: drive (the home of my “Program Files” directory and every program I have ever installed) was BLANK, NOT FORMATTED, and my D: drive wants chkdsk run at boot, but chkdsk keeps saying “Corrupt Master File Table” and aborting.
Yeah, Yeah, you’re going to tell me, “You should have made a backup first”. Would anyone from that particular corner of the room care to tell me exactly HOW to backup 65+ gigs of stuff onto 10 gigs of media? If you can pull off that stunt, I seriously want to know how.
At this point, my plan is to use the freshly emptied partition to backup as much of my D: drive as possible (I’ll be trying to put 11GB of stuff onto an 8GB partition), delete, recreate, and format the partition containing D:, put stuff back on it, and then start re-installing stuff in my Program Files directory as I need it.
…and then spread as much bad publicity about Paragon Partition Manager as I possibly can.
Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, windows+xp, dual+boot, hard+disk, partitioning, Paragon+Partition+manager, errors
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Hey, since you’re installing Ubuntu, why not use the GPartEd program included on the Live CD? (System>Administration>Partition editor)
That way, it’s possible to resize partitions in a much safer way, since changes are tested before applying them.
Since I cannot find documentation that says otherwise, I’ve been operating under the assumption that GPartEd wouldn’t save any data in the partition when moving/resizing it. If it does, it would have been nice to have that information about 18 hours ago. Really doesn’t help much now. :/
A few years back i used partion magic to dual boot an xp box with mandrake linux withouot any problems. I have to try it with Ubuntu though.
I’ve never tried to dual boot my computer yet but if I do ill try Ubuntu and GPartEd. I couldn’t afford to lose anything on my hard drive but the problem is backing it all up and I have no idea how yet.