hey guys... i had redhat on a 4 gig hard drive and it was too smal so i partitioned my 40 gig with xp on it to fit redhat... i installed redhat on hdb2 with xp on hdb1... i booted up and it said error no op system found.. so i had to reinstall xp on hdb2 where linux was so i can try to save my xp files.. a ton of music and stuff... so im in xp on hdb2 right now and i see no other c: or d: drives.. i went into admin tools > disk managment and it says
unkn0wn partition... os/2 something... its still all there and the partition is there but its inactive...

how can i fix this? add another line to boot.ini? or how do i activate it?

heres a pic of my disk managment utility .....

http://hardwarewiz.com/forums/attach...s=&postid=6252

im going to leave for 2 hours to go workout.. hopefully you all will help me ana say alot of stuff thart way i can read it when i get home later tonight and i can fic the prtoblem... thanks guys.

Alrighty. Lets take a crack at this.

What it sounds like is that Redhat screwed over your MBR, so when the computer then, upon rebooting, found a list of, nothing to boot. However, it seems you then furthered the problem, by attempting to fix it by installing XP on a second hard drive, therefore further screwing over and already screwed up system. So basically the XP re-install might have been a real bad idea. But, a few things for you to try.

First thing. Make a Windows XP boot disk.. or just, use a Win whatever boot disk. Boot up the computer with it, and try "fdisk mbr". That resets the operating system table and lets the computer reset the whole darned thing by itself. You may want to remove the second, working, hard drive before you do this, so it only has the one disk to find an os on.

If this doesnt restore any kind of order.. well, your files are gone then. This is why you should backup files...

But, in an attempt to recover them. Try searching for the program "aefdisk". Put it on a boot floppy, and see if it can find the old hard drive/partition for you. If it, or any other program can find the old windows partition with all your files. Delete it. Make a new partition, and don't put anything on it. Then go hunt for any old file recovery program of your choice, run it on the drive, and see how much it can yank back out of it.

all i have to do is activate that partition... its still there.. how do i activate it? will partition magic do it?

ill try what you said and ill be back.. im not deleting that first part. i know its recoverable.

i found aefdisk and i cant seem to get any of the commands to work... i saw on the disk it lets me activate a partition.. thats what i need but i type activate ... ? i dont know the commands... it says type activate...

i tried fdisk mbr and it said no such thing "mbr" or something... maybe iits cause i have a 95 boot disk... does that matter?

what files do i need to make xp boot disk?

can i run the auto recover mode from xp cd?

what options do i chose.. ive never ran that before

i dont know much abt windoze xp, but the command is

fdisk /mbr

dont forget the / part

i used fdisk /mbr and it took both os's off my machine i had to reinstall xp on partition 2 lol

does anyone know what to do?

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