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I'll try to make this brief. I have a secondary drive in my system with 2 partitions and some empty space on it. I increased the size of the second partition and everything seemed fine. When I went to boot it the next day, it wouldn't come up. The normal boot screen would come up with something like "press DEL or F2 to enter" yadda yadda.. and it was frozen there. Any time that drive is connected now, the system freezes and I can't even enter the BIOS menu.

So I managed to an old drive running with Windows and then set BIOS to make every SATA port hot-pluggable and left the SATA cable disconnected as the computer booted.

I started using DistTest (for the first time) and found something odd. In the first analysis screen, if I look into the files, the first partition shows no files and says its bad. The second partition appears OK.
Then I let it scan the drive and it comes up with a second partiton between the two previously reported ones and it contains what I know as my first partition's files.
Initially, the new first partition showed up with an "*" and there was a red error message below it saying it was corrupt. I changed it to blank (as it appears above) and then wrote the partitions and hoped that would fix it, but I think it didn't actually write anything to that corrupt little bit, so it's still there and maybe something in the BIOS is thinking it's a boot partition, but can't figure it out so it just locks up. Well, that's my guess.

I can't figure out how to fix this thing. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

My bad!!! TestDisk helped me to get access to all of the data and I was able to copy it off, but I think my real problem was that I had a 3TB drive and I had partitioned 2TB of it and left it MBR. Then about year later, I came back and increased the size of the partition beyond 2TB. Oops. The strange part was that the PC just lock up if I booted with that drive connected. Only by setting one of the SATA ports to hot-swappable and then connecting the drive after it had booted could I gain access to it. After reformatting and copying all the data back, I'm good again.

Thanks for the help!