Not strictly a linux question I guess but anyone know how to relabel drive partitions - without going into widows and preferably without the use of a floppy disc seeing as my drive is dead.
Think of it as a fun challenge :/
Can I use fdisk to do this?
If so, could someone give me an example or point me in the right direction? I really dont want to break anything else...

It seems something (probably partition magic when I was creating a partition to install Mandrake 10 - which went swimmingly by the way...) has changed "C" drive to be "F" (and created a 30G linux partition as "C") and Im guessing thats why Windows barfs at bootup.

I might start kicking small dogs soon
Help!

The only drive lables that linux recognizes are the device names for the partitions (/dev/hda1, /dev/sda2, etc.) and as far as I know there's absolutely no way to rename these. Windows is what creates a drive label and makes it correspond to a particular partition. Any changes you make there will have to be done in Windows.

So its fully broken then?
Anyone know if deleting the new "C" partition would work? (i make them all fall back into line)

Why do you call it "C" partition? Do you see it as C: in Windows? If so then it can't be Linux partition.

I'm sure there's a way to fix it. At the very least you should be able to back up your data from the old C: drive from within linux.

Is the mislabled drive fat32 or ntfs?

I call the new linux partition "C" because when I boot from the WindowsXP CD and go to "install", it shows me the current partitions on teh disk, one of which is "C". It doesnt recognise the filesystem on that partition and its the right size (30GB) so deduction leads me to believe its the new linux partition.

The mislabeled drive is NTFS, and yes you're right, I can see it from Mandrake10 and should be able to back up the data. I Wonder if I'll be able to make my dvd burner work in mandrake...

Like itsme86 im also sure there's a way to fix it. Though thats more hope than actual facts :/

Thanks for replies so far.

can you boot into windows? if so then linux didn't install over your "C:\" partition. if fdisk really shows that what used to be your "C:\" partition is now an unrecognized format and it's exactly the same size as what you gave to your linux install, then you're hosed. you'd have to use fdisk to reformat that partition and to reinstall windows and all your other doo-dads. basically everything that was in windows is now gone.

edit: reread your parent post. if you're sure that what was your windows installation partition has been relabelled as the "F:\" drive in windows, you may be able to use fdisk, or your partition magic rescue discs to delete your linux partition and to move the "F:\" drive up to the start of the hard drive and to set it as the active boot drive. if you can't then like above, you're pretty much hosed and need a complete reinstall of both windows and linux (partition your hard drive correctly this time).

If I could boot into windows then I could use partition magic to alter the drive letters.
The problem is that something at bootup is looking for drive "C", however the file is now actually on drive "F".
I just need a way of switching the active partition back to the windows partition I guess.
Though I'm not particularly au fait with partitioning... Hence the problem

you responded before i could finish my edit.

Heh yeah im keeping quite a close eye on this topic as you can imagine

"you may be able to use fdisk, or your partition magic rescue discs"
Yeah... I guess I really should have gone ahaead and created those rescue discs when it told me to

Though someone here at work says he can make a bootable partition magic CD that might let me off the hook.
Here's hoping.

Thanks for the help guys,let me know if you have any more ideas.

"(partition your hard drive correctly this time)."
Yep, I have 20/20 hindsight now

good luck to ya.

The drive letters windows set on partions are a real headache. They are dynamically set during boot and have nothing to do with the actual physical partitions other than the fact that windows give the partitions letters to partitions as it detects them.

If your windows can see this partition it therefore give it the drive letter c as it is the first in the disk. I guess that your windows installation got messed up because the reorganizing of partitions. This should be taken care of by partition magic I think.

The problem probably lies in the boot.ini file which would be pointing to the partition you had before. Probably that is the first partition, that is now a linux system. To fix this you would have to change boot.ini to reflect the changes in partitioning.
I think this can be done from the windows install cd using recovery console.

Oh, there might also be another problem. The MBR may point to the first partition for the second stage of bootloding (NTLDR.EXE) which now is moved. This problem I don't know how to fix, other than to let Grub do the chain loading. ???

I could even take a look at boot.ini from Linux seeing as I can still access the windows partition from there...
Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look.

Edit:
Ah... That sounds hairy.
Fingers crossed that Partition Magic will fix this. Though Im not convinced :/

Just found the following info on a PM messageboard:

Could anyone give a little more detail about how to use fdisk from Linux to do this?