My HP laptop has 10 partitions, 3 of which are NTFS because I couldn't get a refund on windows as my supplier was bankrupt. I left it 35 Gigs, and left the recovery partitions (17 Gigs) and installed linux.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 4569 36700461 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 18235 19255 8187904 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 19255 19458 1626112 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 4570 18234 109764112+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4570 4595 204800 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5101 7091 15990784 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 7092 9591 20081216 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 9592 12592 24105500 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 12593 18234 45319332 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 4595 5100 4060394+ 82 Linux swap


Now I notice I can't boot the recovery image. A quick check showed the D: drive (sda2) was labelled as swap, and I sorted that with fdisk. Now it mounts as an ntfs in linux, but won't boot. When I go to testdisk, the results are ambiguous: It has a look at the disk, and asks "Will I back this up?" I nod the head, and I get the green screen, where sda2 is missing.

Has anyone been here and done this before? I don't want to go at it and do the wrong thing. How do you get both partitions bootable in windows world?

If it was labelled as swap, is it possible that your Linux install used it as such, and so wrote stuff on it which would mess up the original NTFS filesystem? When you look at it in Linux, are all the file you would expect to be there actually there? And have you tried running repair commands from the Windows recovery console (I *think* it's "chkdsk -f" but you'll want to look that up - I need to go out in -2 minutes so I can't right now :S) Just a couple of thoughts...

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/later

Well, I messed it up, and now have it back with all the partitions renumbered :-/. Now I get caught because grub doesn't boot - error 15. But I got far enough to get this update online.

FWIW, I always cockily mention That I always back up mbr & mbr1 with dd. I know I did, but I can't find then for love or money :-/.

Thanks Snark1994

I think the thing has survived reasonably well. The problem deteriorated to getting booted, trying to ressurect caelinux with weird errors, and eventually installing grub in slackware. I hate this boot stuff with a passion, but I think I got it. I'm going anyhow, and hibernating so it will be a while before I find out :-D. What a waste of an afternoon.

Ah, I never count an afternoon spent shouting "WHY DON'T YOU WORK, YOU *******!" at a computer wasted

I call that a highly wasted afternoon; computers are deaf and inanimate (sounding like Spock here , and I should have known what to do with it instead of tripping over my shoelaces. I also feel it is an error to get annoyed with an inanimate object - there's no malice.

NOW, I have a hibernation issue (rebuilt kernel to sort that), so I get to see what grub does.
It spits up a page of partitions and boot options which are all crap, and pointed in the wrong direction. I used grubconfig. I select the first one, (windows on sda1) and it throws me back to my own menu.lst which is fairly well ordered. Others just crap out (it's trying to boot off /home) I can't find this first file to fix it :-o

WTF?