Partition Troubles
 

I don't know where to exactly make this thread but hereit goes.

I used partition magic 8.0 to delete my partitions dell made on my hdd and then tried to merge the first partition with the other one so windows would be the first partition. At least that was what i was trying to do. I left the merge run over night since it was taking awhile and i was tired. I woke up to the screen tellin gme there was a warning and to press any key to reboot.. doing that it wouldnt load windows. It would show the dell boot screen and then say somethingl ike PBR loaded (i think it said pbr not entirely sure)

but the reason trying to do all this partitioning was to make windows partition 1.. and then install slackware on partition 2 .. now i dont have either working .. how can i get windows to work again without reformating my drive. To much stuff on my drive that i do not want to lose.

my harddrive is a 150g seagate (sata)

boot to PM again, and look at the partitions... if the windows partition looks intact, go ahead and setup your linux partitions, and don't worry about it... you'll be overwriting the MBR anyways...

if it looks bad, you have bigger problems...

Could it be that your Dell has the same configuration like mine, with a very small FAT partition as the 1st primary partition and then a large partition for XP (NTFS) as second?

I doubt that it will work to merge the small boot partition with the main system. Why don't you just leave it as it is and shrink the large XP partition to make room for Linux? OK, this may be too late now, but I can't think of a solution, if this is really the case. Don't you have a possibility to undo the merge operation?

Lions, Tigers, PBRs... Oh My!
 

The Volume Boot Sector (Partition Boot Sector aka PBR) is the first sector of a partition. If the partition is boot-able, it stores an executable program to load an operating system.

Hopefully, you created an emergency repair disk for your Windows OS. If not, try creating a Windows bootable floppy on a friend's PC running the same OS. An old DOS startup disk with installable device drivers for the CD-ROM might work too.

The floppy will also need to contain DOS system executables (FORMAT, CHKDISK and so on). The command you will need to use is FDISK.

Once you boot up with the floppy, type in the command FDISK. The FDISK Options menu should appear with 4 options:

1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information

Select #4 to verify which partition Windows is on. Then go back to the menu and select #2, and make your Windows partition the "active" partition. This solution may allow you to recover without losing all your Windows data. Otherwise, you will have to start from scratch and reformat your hdd.

I tried dual-boot set ups in the past and found they were more trouble than its worth! If you must have a dual boot setup, forget partitioning and just install a second hard drive! Trust me, you will breathe easier. On the other hand... you can just quit Win-blows all together and join the super suave and elite Linux crowd :cool: