I was just getting into my new partitioning scheme, when things went "pear shaped".

Using partition magic 8, deleted the linux partitions. Fine.

Made a new FAT32 partition to put my mp3s in, so that both windows and linux can see them. Great - except then I get a very quick dialogue box from partition magic to say that it's gonna reboot the system (which was a little unexpected). Less than 5 seconds later, it's rebooting - which in theory, should have been OK,

but I hadn't put the windows boot loader back.

So the system wouldn't boot - bugger!

I tried booting my XP disc and then switching to the recovery console and doing "fixmbr". Which didn't work.

I tried booing the XP disc again and doing "fixboot C", which also didn't work.

I booted a knoppix disc to see if I could work out how to mend things with that, but I was unsucessful with that as well.

So, I've managed to get a system up and running with my old mandrake 9.1 DVD which seems to have got most things back (until I've finished the partition scheme and re-installed Gentoo), except, if I try to boot into XP now, I get the start up progress screen, but where it should then show the user and admin accounts screen, I get a blue screen with the warning that it can't find the AUTOCHECK programme - and about 3 seconds later it just auto reboots.

Does anyone know how I correct/mend this? or will I have to slash my wrists and re-install windows ???

regards

John

did you change the size of the xp patition with PM8? If so it may be easier to just reinstall. I am not saying it can't be fixed but may be easier to just reinstall than for me/someone to type out a whole how to. That is a major problem with partition magic, I have never used it personally but I have had to recover more than one, with the same problem you have caused by the software. If you don't have, must have info on the drive reinstall and start over.

Try pressing F8 during your windows boot to get options, Last known good configuration

KC

Chances are it won't even get that far, but its worth a shot.

When you attempt to boot, what error message(s) are you receiving? Have you tried using PM8 to mark a partition as active/bootable? I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that after reconfiguring the partition table, fixmbr isn't going to do much since I think that it works with a backup copy of the master boot record rather than recreating it.

You might try a repair install of Windows...
Can it boot into safe mode? If so, login and go to start->run and

Since this problem occured, I've ended up going for the "re-install" option. Which has cured the non-booting windows problem except, for reasons that I don't follow, I'm left with a nice shiney new FAT32 formatted mp3 partition which the system insists in calling the "C" drive and the actual windows XP install (NTFS) is now calling itself the "F" drive.

I used my old mandrake DVD to "re-install the bootloader", but when the current temporary install of mandrake starts booting, it just errors and won't go any further.

So I decided to see what would happen if I tried to re-install the mandrake on it's original partitions, but the mandrake installer now says that it won't go any further because the partition table is too corrupted, it offers me the choice of just continuing without any modifications from harddrake, but if I try that, it's just freezing.

I wonder how I'll cure that. The only answer that I can think of, would be to say "sod it" and just install linux all over the windows XP, though I'm reluctant to do that, as the "family ramifications" are too awful to contemplate.

I'm not quite sure how I'd go about changing the drive letters back issue, as that may (though I'm not sure) help the problem of the installing etc etc.

regards

John

Sounds like the drive may be failing.

You problem, I assume, is that windows was not installed on the very first partition of the HD.

There should be three primary partitions, and an (optional) extended partition with as many additional FAT32 drives as you see fit.

WinXP will install to the first one - it don't matter whether it is NTFS of FAT32.

The second primary should be a tiny swap partition with the boot loader. How the motherboard BIOS knows to check the boot-loader before booting windows is beyond me, but it works.

(I am still a newbie, but RedHat set this one up very easily, thanks in part to the fact that my 40 Gig HD was already split into C: / D: - 8/30 gigs, however, cramming all my docs & programs off the D drive and onto C, and deleting entirely the D drive (about 85% of my Windows programs) really made windows ME very screwy, but it still booted...)

The third should be the Ext3 partition that installs Linux OS...

The fourth (optional) extended partition can be a smaller FAT32 that can be accessed by both operating systems.

Windows is far pickier that Linux about where it is installed, and if it was further down the drive than Linux, and you deleted the Linux partitions, then the BIOS would look to the boot sector of the HD and find nothing - I am assuming that after you installed the Windows XP again on FAT32, then the OS logically assigns all drive letters in the logical order they appear: C, D, E, F, G, and so on.

D, E, and F are probably all of the ghosts left over from Linux that WinXP cannot interpret, and you are indeed very lucky that you can still access your precious data after Partition Magic F***ed up your HD. You may probably now have split, fragmented partitions, and all sorts of garbage!

Disks were originally designed to be partitioned and then formatted, and then have dataplaced on those formatted spaces.

They were NEVER originally intended to have partitions, etc, moved around and reformatted while simultaneously preserving the data intact.

These softwares work by hacking the drive structure in ways it wasn't intended.

So my advice to you, is backup your precious data before anything gets further messed up, with whatever means you have available, CDRs, USB-flash drives, ZIP disks, of even FLOPPIES, heaven forbid!!!

You need to COMPLETELY DELETE ANY AND ALL PARTITIONS off the drive, then reboot, repartition, or better yet, trash partition magic, then use a spare HD if it is good with no bad sectors, and Install XP on the bigger one, Linux on the other, screw the whole entire boot-loader idea, and use your motherboard BIOS to pick which drive to boot (usually in the form of a menu) when you power up the computer - Put them both on the same ribbon cable - One should be set to "MAster" and the other to "SLAve"

Then you can use a simple USB 2.0 flash drive (FAT-formatted) to transferre all of your files back and forth tween Windows and Linux. And get a BIG one, like a 1.0 Gb SanDisk or something. If one OS gets shot and goes to hell, the other will not be affected at all. What's more, you don't have to configure anything else at all

Yeah, I'd bet the disk is going down the drain. There is a way of changing drive letters in Windows...never done it myself but I've read about it.

Nah, I don't think it's the disc, it's more likely that I'm being too damn impatient and clicking stuff before reading any dialogue boxes and the like.

As it happens, it's become academic now, as I've installed debian over the top of everything i.e. that is, I installed mandrake, an older version that I had "kicking around" (9.1), did all the partitioning and stuff, then I downloaded knoppix 3.8.1, burned it too disc and then installed it to the hard drive, I'm just finishing up with the updates/upgrades.

Definitely the lazy persons way of installing Debian

regards

John

p.s. Oh and yes, I did find the link to the M$ instructions about changing the drive letter, but as I had Partition Magic installed at the time, I thought I'd try that as it's likely to be easier - well it wasn't cos it screwed things up again, hence saying bollocks to it and installing the debian!