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itek

i have recently stuffed around with my partitions

have just freshly installed xp

have an unknown partition that has my old documents from xp install

(i tryed to repair that installation yet made it unbootable past the splash screen)

now i want to recover my documents from that old installation
on to my new installation

i go to ,control panel, admin partitions

and my old installation partition, since i did NOT wipe, to preserve my documents,

reads as an unknown partition

so can someone please help to

make unknown partition visible

or to extract old documents from unknown partition

Hengis

Welcome to the forum itek. I found some info for you...let us know if it helps.

What does "Healthy (Unknown Partition)" mean?

"Healthy (Unknown Partition)" is the way hidden partitions typically show up in XP's Disk Management console. Although XP can "see" the partition, it will not assign it a drive letter and cannot access files on the hidden partition.
On occasion, a data partition may accidentally have its partition-type code toggled to "hidden" and any data on it may appear to be lost. To recover, simply toggle the partition-type back to its proper code. There are a number of third-party utilities that can easily do this, such as PartitionMagic, BootIt-NG, Partition Commander, Ranish Partition Manager, et al. If you don't have something like that, the easiest way may be to download the free utility ptedit.zip. Extract ptedit.exe from within the zipfile, boot from a DOS floppy (or Win98 startup floppy, or see www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one), run ptedit.exe, and change the appropriate partition-type from hidden-NTFS (or hidden-FAT32) to normal NTFS (or FAT32). Reboot into XP and see if the partition now shows up as it should.

Source: goodells.net