My Win XP Home SP 2 PC has a 160 GB hard drive (might be Maxtor, but I'm not sure).
There are supposed to be 2 partitions:
1. HP_RECOVERY (Drive D) - FAT32 - about 5.8 GB
2. HP_PAVILION (Drive C) - NTFS - the rest of the drive
I recently made an unsuccessful attempt to shrink my NTFS partition with QT Parted to install Ubuntu (Linux). Since then, the NTFS partition started showing up as Unknown or Unformatted in various Linux diagnostics programs (which I'm running off Live CDs).
I download an Ultimate Boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com) and used the TestDisk tool.
Here's what it showed:
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5846/img0075ta4.jpg
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/6841/img0076zk1.jpg
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/6503/img0077ka0.jpg
In the screen shown in the 3rd image, I found I was able to make one of the 2 partitions not Deleted.
These images, and a helpful email from TestDisk's author, suggest 2 things:
1) The hard drive's geometry is damaged (I don't know how, or what this means, exactly).
2) The two partitions might be overlapping each other somehow - hence only one can supposedly be restored.
I don't really care about the HP_RECOVERY partition (I can order a recovery DVD from HP), but I desperately need the files on the HP_PAVILION partition.
If I change the status of the HP_PAVILION partition to [Primary & Bootable] in TestDisk, will it start working normally again? At the very least, I need to be able to save the files, with complete filenames and directories, to another hard drive (external, preferably).
Any other ideas?

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