I did a little looking and didn't find exactly what I was looking for so my question is...........

I used my Mandrake 10.0 official cd to resize a windoze partition,
Fat32 with XP Pro, yes it should be NTFS and that is one of the things I planning on fixing.

Anyway, after resizing the partition XP won't boot and I can't boot from the XP cd to maybe try and repair damages. Mandrake is not installed as the computer is not mine and the owner is not prepared for the wonderful world of Linux.

Is there a way I can fix the windows partition without losing the information on it?

I saw a post about mounting the partition and trying to save the files by transferring them to a Linux partition but as I said Linux is not installed.

Probably doen't matter but the drive is an 80 gig Maxtor.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!
And thanks in advance!!


P.S.

Why is there no Gentoo Forum?

Try bootup with a WinMe boot disk and type: fdisk /mbr

I was going to try to boot with an XP boot disk but wanted to ask a few questions first. You think the ME disk would be the best option?

Put it in another computer as a slave and see ify ou can rip the files off of it.

And why are you messing with partitions if a) you weren't going to put linux on it b) if its not your computer?

The system has alot of junk floating around in it so my friend wanted me to try and save as much of the information as I could before doing a format/reload for him. To accomplish this I decided to create a safe zone(another partition) to store the info that was to be kept while I took care of the job ahead. After that was done I had intended on trying to convince my friend to give Mandrake a shot because it is pretty user friendly.


"My profile says newbie but I am not so new"

Windows puts system files all over a partition it's installed on. Re-sizing a Windows partition can and usually does mean a re-install. I know, I did it myself once.
You can fixmbr from the XP install disc. It's a while since I used Windows so I can't remeber the exact process. But if you follow the install procedure to the point where it detects the currently installed system it'll give you a repair option.
Hope it fixmbr works. If not, do as the last post advises and copy the important files. Then re-install Windows.

What does this mean:Does it boot, then fail ???. I'm presuming so - if so the MBR is o.k., and recovery console probably won't help.
If you can't boot the CD, you can't do that anyway - I'm confused.

As for mounting and (hopefully) recovering - Knoppix. Always think Knoppix.
Just remember it mounts everything R/O, so you'll have to remount the target directory to be able to save your data.

I used the slave idea and got it all back to working order. With Mandrake installed as dual.