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| Thread ID: 36750 | 2003-08-19 09:48:00 | I broke XP.. Real bad.. It'll teach me for playing with partitions! | Chilling_Silently (228) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 168667 | 2003-08-19 09:48:00 | Okay.... My bad.. I had WinXP installed on the second partition on my primary master HDD. All was good, there was just files on the primary partition, remnants of a Win98 installation for many-a-months back, so I figured "Why not format that partition as Ext2 for Linux" (Partition Magic 7 doesnt do Ext3). All went well when I formatted it, but upon reboot, i ran into troubles, and havent been in XP since. Ive currently gone and installed JAMD 0.0.6 on that partition, and the XP parition is FAT32 so I have R/W access to it. Now, I tried running repair, or even a clean install over top, but none of it would work, it wouldnt let me go past the partitioning screen. I cant remember why, that was early this morning and its been a long day. So I decided to install VMWare and get WinXP setup in that, and copy the boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect etc off that. Still no joy, even though I have modified the boot.ini file. What to do? Where do I start? What more info do I need to post back? Cheers Chill. |
Chilling_Silently (228) | ||
| 168668 | 2003-08-19 10:10:00 | Howdy Chill, The problem will most likely be due to where the boot file is located :) From memory almost all operating systems like to have the boot file located in the first 63 ?:| sectors of the hard drive. You will probably need to format the first partition as FAT and then try to recover the XP or re-install. Have fun :D |
Gorela (901) | ||
| 168669 | 2003-08-19 12:03:00 | If I read you right your XP was not on the first partition, i.e. drive C. That being the case, when you installed Linux you splattered the "normal" booting arrangement. Two things come to mind. A reinstall of XP might (and some Linux guru will tell all) recover the boot sectors - I somehow doubt that. Try a Boot Manager programme like System Commander. They boast multiple boot capabilities, basically by installing their own boot loader and then pulling the desired one back for the rest of the boot process. If you can't get hold of such software (I think there are freebees out there, consider a reinstall of everything , but the boot drive (C) should have the XP. Bummer ! Crunn |
Crunn (1068) | ||
| 168670 | 2003-08-19 12:05:00 | Oh.. Joy... Right now I've got a /boot (100 MB), then a SWAP (256MB iirc), then the remainder of 4gigs as / All are Primary partitions. Do I need to somehow re-mount /boot on the / partition and format /boot as FAT32 and clear the contents? This could be a loooong process, as I'd rather not format my Linux partitions... :-( |
Chilling_Silently (228) | ||
| 168671 | 2003-08-19 12:12:00 | XOSL maybe? | Chilling_Silently (228) | ||
| 168672 | 2003-08-19 12:12:00 | heres a little trick I learned the other day that just might get WinXP back into the MBR. Fire in your XP cd, and go to recovery console. then type in: Fixboot Fixmbr First one should work and should write a new bootsector on the system partition. After that it might pay to load up linux again and fix lilo or grub so it will then boot XP again. |
PoWa (203) | ||
| 168673 | 2003-08-19 12:22:00 | Cheers, I'll try that! | Chilling_Silently (228) | ||
| 168674 | 2003-08-19 12:28:00 | Powa, that worked for me a month or so back after a botched linux install dual booting with win 2k , it's worth a try Chill yoo might have to tweak your boot.ini later, if the fix mbr works. Cheers Murray P |
Murray P (44) | ||
| 168675 | 2003-08-22 03:14:00 | Well, I tried fixboot and fixmbr with no luck :-( It totally killed Grub (As expected . . and sadly my boot disk didnt work, so i re-installed JAMD over top of itself and it seems to be working . . . XP totally killed the /boot partition!) and then complained about no NTLDR . Luckily I'd backed up the files in the C:\ dir when I'd created a WinXP install in VMWare . . copied them across and modified the boot . ini so (Im hoping) it points to the correct partition . Still no workies :-( Anyways, here's my boot . ini [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOW S [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect In Linux its the hda5 partition, so I assumed 5 would be fitting . . But its still no go? Ideas? Cheers Chill . |
Chilling_Silently (228) | ||
| 168676 | 2003-08-22 03:24:00 | If all the partitions are primary, there won't be a partition 5. That's the number given to the first extended partition on a disk. If you can get XP going again, I think the Mandrake installation CD has a rescue boot option. For some reason it won't boot on the machine I am having trouble with, so I haven't tried it. But you can always make floppies from a CD. :D |
Graham L (2) | ||
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