UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Ok, here's the deal.

I'm running WinXp.

I was merging two partitions using partition magic when I lost power to my box.

I have very IMPORTANT data on one partition and the other is blank, hence the attempted merge.

After the power loss, I booted my system up. Now, I was getting errors that this and that file was missing and my OS could not load.

So, I formatted and installed WinXp on the partition that had nothing on it. After installing partion magic, i ran the program. Upon launching partition magic i receive a message stating that it detects a merge attempt would you like to try to recover, blah blah blah. ok, so, i hit yes. the recovery was successful. the recovered partition according to partition magic is now recognized as a "Xenix BBT" type partition. after some research i find that Xenix is a version of UNIX which leads me to these forums. Ok, so I'd like to be able to recover my data on this Xenix partition. If anyone can give me some hints or help as to how I can go about doing this, I'd appreciate it and would be in your debt FOREVER!

1) Do I have to install an OS that recognizes a Xenix file system? it's obvious that windows doesn't recognize UNIX file systems of any type.

2) Is my data recoverable at all?
If this is a lost cause, just let me know and I will format the Xenix partition which will cause all of my data to be lost.

Please Please help, anyone.

Your partition type has been set to "FF" which is a Xenix Bad Block Table. Had it been set to "02", that would claim it to be a Xenix file system. But do you really think that your data could be accidentally reformatted into a correctly structured Xenix filesystem?

I think that your data is trashed. But does anyone know of a utility to simply set the partition type? I would just try to set the partition type and see where that leaves me.

Here is a list of the possible types. It says that FF is just BBT. Here is a page that supports the view that FF is "Xenix BBT", it's mostly in Japanese, but most of the table is in English.

Well, good luck....I have the feeling you're going to need it...

Yea, I've already found the tables. With partition magic there is no option to set the partition type with the Xenix BBT partition.

Well, see that's what confused me too. After partition magic detected that there was a merger already in progress, it attempted to fix itself and was successful according to the pop-ups i was getting. But it's weird that it would turn it into a Xenix system and not something recognized by any windows OS.

I'll do more research to see what I can do. Thanks for the support.