Partition Magic = Really Messed up windows... but linux works
 

The original thread where this topic started can be foundhere.

Now to the point this is where I am right now.

I have RHEL WS 4 installed on my dell latitude d400, everything is working except the wireless card.

I was attempting to install a dual boot RHEL/ XP pro and used norton Partition magic... it worked so well that it screwed up my xp nice and good. That I was getting weird messages and couldnt get it to boot and when it did it said the file system might be corrupt.. so I went to put my windows reinstallation cd back in and it would start to boot, displaying the normal "windows is checking your system configuration or whatever" and then it freezes. That happens no matter what windows cd I put in, I tried a dell pro reinstall, a dell home reinstall, and a pro full version. All gave the same results. It boots from bios but then freezes when checking settings or whatever. I can boot from a RHEL disk and it works perfectly normal.

(oh, and I tried to run knoppix, but it failed to load properly)

How can I fix it?

I don't have a floppy drive... perhaps I could run dos off a cd? does that work? and delete everything?

help por favor :P

I also used to use partition magic 8 to do all my partitioning things. It only became an issue, when I decided to make a seperate partition for my mp3s. The master plan was so that both XP and linux (various distros) would be able to all see the partition and play the tracks!

I screwed up, because although i'd formatted the partition as FAT32 I'd missed the bit that had the partition identified as "linux extended". It should have been just windows extended or W98 or something like that. Because I had the "linux" annotation, bloody XP wouldn't see it or anything.

The only thing I could do, was to completely reformat the whole hard drive, then install XP, get it up to date, then re-install the partition magic and then get it to do the things that I wanted, in the order that I wanted.

I'm guessing here, but it sounds like you've buggered up the partitions table big time (just what I did trying to correct the above mistake). Unless someones got a better idea, I'm thinking that it's probably time you did your backups of anything you want too keep from linux and start from scratch!

Sorry! that's not very helpful is it!

regards

John

How should I go about deleting everything?

What exactly do you want to delete? the whole drive? Than just format it.

How should I go about formatting it?

If you're going to "reinstall everything," why not just delete that Windows partition altogether? ;)

Otherwise, see if you can boot into something, get to a command line and enter /sbin/parted /dev/hda. Print the partition-table as it is and look at it. Are the boundaries of the partition correct? Is the LBA flag turned on in the Windows partition?

If Linux will come up correctly, see if you can mount the Windows partition from within Linux. If so, do an fsck on it, read-only. See if you can do that. What you're basically trying to determine is... if the Windows data still exists, and if so, whether it is intact.

Another point to consider is the boot-sequence. It looks like XP's loader is getting control and is bringing-up XP at least far enough for it to be able to "think that there is a problem," but if the settings aren't correct then ... well, we all know what happens when a computer tries to be "helpful." :rolleyes:

The reason why I don't advise "just reinstalling everything" is that, until you know what the problem is, the chances are excellent that you will simply make things worse... for Linux and for XP.

The windows data is gone, I deleted it when I reinstalled linux and told it to reformat the entire drive. Linux is functioning as it should. only thing not working is the wireless card... and if I knew how to install the driver.. then I would get that working too..

I am new to linux... ;) obviously... because I am clueless

Ok MS-Dos and Fdisk deleted everything and now the windows cd will boot.... ... now... what is the best way to install everything windows xp pro and RHEL 4?

Install Windows first, then install linux

I've been meddling with this linux lark for 3 years or so, and I still reckon that I'm clueless. In fact, the more I learn, the less I know!

All these brilliant app's that I have installed. I wish I had the faintest idea of how to use them!

Just for info, as I understand it, with XP, it doesn't have to be the first OS on a hard drive anymore, but because of crap problems from the days of W98/2000/millenium etc etc theres no point in challenging traditional linux wisdom, so the Bluenoser is pretty much spot on. Windows then linux.

I'm guessing, but it also depends on whoelse uses your system i.e. wife/partner/family etc etc, because once you've got to the stage of having got both re-installed, then you'll probably find that when you tell the linux to install the bootloader it will make the linux install the default. Which is fine if you're the only person who uses the system, but if like me you have wife/partner/family then it was always easier for me to make windows the default, so my technophobe partner wouldn't give me the shits about booting into windows - she's a teacher and they only have MS stuff at school so she won't learn linux!

As long as you remember to save any data you want to keep etc, then hell, you can meddle as much as you want. Personally it took me 18 months too learn the wisdom of having seperate root, boot, swap and home partitions. Though too start with if the RHEL will install to just 1 partition then great, just go with it until you learn some more stuff!

regards

John