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I'm running WinXP with a 250GB HD. I have the HD split into 2 partitions, (C: and L:). Well recently I realized that I have about 70GB of unallocated space, so I decided I was gonna add redistribute it. I start up partition magic and tell it what I need it to do. I then reboot and let it go to work. It starts out first resizing the L: drive. At about 17%, it just stopped. I let it sit for about 2 hours, hoping that maybe it would work itself out, but nothing. So I have to reboot, then nothing happens. I go back into partition magic and the partition that was once the L: drive, now instead of it showing NTFS, it says PqRP and shows as "other," and has no drive letter. In Disk Management, it shows as a logical drive and healthy, but says unknown partition. I can't rename it, or do anything to it other than delete it. If anyone has any ideas as to how to recover this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

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described a classic interrupted-resize: Partition Magic stopped mid-operation and the L: volume now shows as "PqRP" and as an unknown logical partition in Disk Management. The priority is to stop any further writes to the disk so the on-disk data that remains can be preserved.

First step: make a complete, sector-level image of the affected drive to an external disk. Boot from a rescue USB (Clonezilla or a small Linux live image) and use a tool that tolerates read errors, for example GNU ddrescue. Work only on the image, not the original disk. Example commands (run from a Linux rescue environment) look like this:

ddrescue -n /dev/sda /mnt/external/disk-image.img /mnt/external/ddrescue.log
ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sda /mnt/external/disk-image.img /mnt/external/ddrescue.log

See GNU ddrescue and Clonezilla for bootable media and usage notes.

After imaging, analyze the image in read-only mode. If the partition table is inconsistent, software that scans for filesystem signatures or carves files from the raw image can recover data even when metadata is lost. PhotoRec is a robust file-carving tool for raw recovery; commercial packages (for example R-Studio) can scan images and attempt partition reconstruction with a GUI. Test recovery results onto a separate disk, not back to the failing drive. See PhotoRec and R-Studio.

Do not initialize, format, delete partitions, or run any repair that writes to the original disk before imaging. If the data is critical and these steps feel risky, stop and consult a professional data-recovery service. Thanks to , and for the pointers in this thread; the safest practical workflow is image-first, analyze-second.

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Member Avatar for goldeagle2005

And if you ever have unallocated space, I strongly recommend Disk Management to format the space as a valid partition. It takes just 30 seconds to complete the process, including a quick format

Member Avatar for reyark

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Member Avatar for lalji

c: drive is unknown partition so i want to this problem solution

Member Avatar for gerbil

On your XP cd there is a folder named Support. Use dskprobe.exe that is contained within. Else use another XP installation to modify the disk mbr with Testdisk.
fixmbr will not do the job - it only rewrites the first 440 bytes of MBR code; it does not alter the partition table entries. Which is why it is so fast, it does not scan the disk for partitions.

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