Hello. I recently put an IDE-PCI controller in on my machine so that I could have 3 hard drives booting and for a FAT32 partition to share between linux and windows. On the new hard drive I used Windows 2000's partition utility from its installation for the new drive (going through the new IDE controller) since I figured it would only affect that drive. Not so.

In fact the 2k installation for some reason decided to assume that the new hard drive was part of the linux hard drive, and so when I boot into Windows, it shows two drives instead of three, and on the second drive, it has the new ntfs and fat32 partition listed as being part of the linux drive. My guess is that the 2000 installation messed around with some of the partition info on the linux drive under the illusion that it was part of it.

My linux distro is RedHat 9 (shrike), kernels 2.4.20-20.9, 2.4.20-9, and 2.4.20-8. None of the kernels work now. When I boot into Linux from Grub, I get this:

Checking filesystems
Couldn't find matching filesystem: LABEL=/files [FAILED]

*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.

/files being a partition I made for miscellaneous files in case somethin happens. If I boot to the RedHat shrike installation CD, it tells me that it has to format the entire drive because some of the partition tables are messed up. THANKS MICROSOFT.

Now when I go into /boot, there are NO FILES THERE!! Why would Win2k delete those files, and what would it be doing messing with my linux drive??? Is there anyway I can reinstall the boot partition and not have to reinstall linux?

Windows didn't delete the files just screwed over the partition table, and or Formatted it. If you can't rember what the original partition table said, then you probably have not better solution that re-installing. After all its the MS way. and next time never allow windows to partition or format anything!

Wellllllll if you have ever wondered what a knowledgable (I consider myself knowledgable) person can do in about 2 hours to mess up their computer, here's what....

The 2k installation actually installed all that stuff onto the linux drive. It took my downloaded files partition and replaced it with a new NTFS partition and a FAT32 partition. I opened the drive up in Partition Magic 8 and guess what it showed me?

One drive (XP) that had a 30 gig NTFS partition.
One drive (formerly Linux) with 60 gigs of partitions including the previous Linux partitions and 2 new NTFS and FAT32 partitions
One drive (blank) that is 20 gigs of unformatted space.

I might mention that the second drive is only 40 gigs.

Soooooo...windows installed the new stuff into my /files partition on the linux drive and as you can see the partition tables are obviously, pardon my french, f*cked up. But it left the old /files partition in the partition tables for some reason. Yippeeee.

Now I can't boot to anything. And when I try to start a windows install it says that I have only 2 drives, one them 30 gig and one of them 40 gig (with 60 gigs of partitions on it). All I can think of to save any data I have is to take both drives out and install windows onto the blank drive, put each other drive in one at a time and save data off it if I can, and then wipe everything clean and start from fresh.

Either way all my linux stuff is history. Welp looks like I've got about 15 hours of work ahead of me on this machine. Jesus...