Do NOT use Syamntec’s Partition Magic!
I like to experiment with crazy things on my computer at home, sometimes I need to create, edit and delete partitions at the drop of a hat and a friend of mine suggested Partition Magic because it was easy to use and good. The first time I used it, I was creating a partition of a certain size on my secondary hard drive, seems easy enough. When the program told me to reboot the computer I did so only to find out that a boot file (from the boot sector of my main hard drive) had gone missing and now the computer couldn’t find Windows. After doing some research on the message I was getting, I found out how to copy the file BACK to the main hard drive and everything was cool again. For a long time I had three partitions when I went into My Computer within Windows (one on my main drive and two on the second drive) and I no longer needed the two on the second drive so I told Partition Magic to delete one partition and resized the other partition to be the full size of the drive (80GB). The computer restarted and Partition Magic kicked in and did it’s thing. Got into Windows and saw two partitions, the main one and the secondary one was only 16GB instead of 80. I went back into Partition Magic and the idiotic program refused to resize the partition to the full size. I finally right clicked on the second drive (D drive, 76.8GB…I know this size because that’s what Partition Magic said it was) and clicked format. The computer rebooted and again, PM was going crazy, this time with errors, but it was all flying by so fast and it was too late to stop it. Computer restarted again but this time I got an error message saying Winload.exe was missing or corrupt. Did some research and tried many different things, to no avail. To get a graphical look at my main hard drive, I went into the Vista installation and it said the main drive was completely empty while the secondary drive (the one I was trying to format) was almost full with only 9GB left on it (out of 80, this was weird since the drive was completely empty when I wanted to format it). So, with a sigh of frustration, I took the main drive out and connected it to an external drive kit and hooked it up to my laptop so I could try and get my stuff off of it (this drive had some excrutiatingly important stuff on it and I would like to keep it) and to my utter surprise, lack thereof, or immediate anger, I found out that the drive itself didn’t even work. I installed the drivers so my laptop could see it, but I couldn’t access it. So I downloaded some trial file recovery software and ran it on my C drive on the laptop, it found a lot of stuff. Hopeful, I ran it on the E drive (the 500GB drive from my desktop) and the program crashed as soon as it started searching. I did it a couple more times and it crashed every time. Now I was getting REALLY irritated at the fact that for the second time, Partition Magic had done something I didn’t tell it to do and for the first time, completely erased a drive I wasn’t even working on. I got another program for my laptop to see a graphical version of my hard drive and sure enough, it was empty but the parition was damaged, which is why nothing could scan it and I would have to completely reformat it in order to be able to use it again. I unhooked it and put it on my desk and sent a very unhappy e-mail to Symantec. I don’t think anything will come of it, but I’m keeping my drive exactly how it is in case they want to try and help recover the data that was on it, but I’m not holding my breath. I kept getting error messages and corruption messages anytime I tried to do anything with the drive, so I’m going to run some diagnostics on it at some point today and PRAY that the program didn’t physically (which isn’t very likely, but I’m not ruling anything out with that crap program) damage the drive and make it unuseable. If it is, they owe me some valuable data and a new 500GB hard drive, but more than likely I’ll just have to reformat the drive but if I do that then I’ll have to get some sort of hardcore government data recovery program to get my stuff back since formatting the harddrive pretty much means that any program you can get off the shelves or online will not be able to recover any files since they’ve been written over, or erased in the case of formatting. Anyway, that’s my horror story with Symantec’s junk that I shouldn’t have used in the first place. I’m gonna go slap myself for using it more than once (even after the first time it screwed something up). PIECE!!!!!
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