Hi;

I can see I should have checked with this news group before trying to
restore my large hard drive.   The hard drive was originally
partitioned using Partition Magic 5 and has been used for several
years.  I recently upgraded PM5 to PM8 as I will be getting a new
computer with XP.  Somewhere along the line, major problems arose.  I
originally tried to backup my entire hard disk to a USB connected 120
Gb Maxtor external hard drive.  Since my internal HD is fairly full,
my direct copy backup did not work and at least one of the partitions
done on the external drive became corrupted.

I originally contacted Symantec -- which now owns Powerquest -- for
paid assistance.  In following their advice, I encountered a problem
that my system could not find vmm32.vxd, but received a message to
correct it -- which I followed and had to re-boot.  Once I did this, I
only had Win 98SE on my C partition and could not read D, E and F at
all.  I realized I should have stopped at this point to get help.  I
also made the mistake of trying to use PM 8 to find and restore the D
partition.  This caused the computer to freeze again and when I
rebooted, all I got was a flashing cursor in the upper left hand
corner.  Using the Win 98SE Boot Disk, I could see all of the C
partition under DOS but could not get it to bring up Windows.

With this situation, I contacted Microsoft Paid Support.  The first
comment made by at least two of the Microsoft Tech Support people was
that the inability of my system to find vmm32.vxd generally means that
Win 98SE has to be re-installed.  However, they tried to assist me in
copying the C Partition which I could see under DOS to a second new
and unformatted 80 Gb hard disk in my computer.  None of the usual DOS
commands regardless of switches used seemed to be able to do the job.

I apologize for the detailed background but felt it was essential to
ask for any possible assistance given the several major errors I have
made along the way.  I have a number of important MS Word,
WordPerfect, PDF and TXT files on the D Partition -- probably 3 --4
GB.  The E partition is less important.  However, The F partition
contains as much as 15 Gb of Jpeg files from my 5 and 6 megapixel Pro
Digital Cameras.  I fortunately did backup on CDs some of them but a
number remain in 3 main sub-directories.

At this point, is there any software which would allow me to retrieve
the document files from the now corrupted D partition and the large
number of Jpeg files from the corrupted F partition?  If not, I will
probably have to resort to one of the Data Recovery Services which I
realize will be very expensive -- especially for my Jpeg files.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or assistance.

E. Novak