Partition Magic question, or, HELP!!!!!

General Questions
#1

I have a 40 gig hard drive, well, 38 or so formatted.
I’m running Windows XP.
So I take 8 gigs and make it into a new partition to install Windows 98se on it.
The new drive is made active and my current C drive is hidden.
The system reboots.
Try as I might, I can’t get my Windows 98 disk to boot, so install DOS 6.22 on my new C drive instead (I couldn’t get my Win98 boot disk to work).
I had the drive set to Fat32 but DOS formats it as Fat16.
After installing DOS I add CD-ROM support and install Windows 98.
Using Windows 98 I reconvert the C Drive back to Fat32.
I install Boot Magic, but it’s only picking up one partition with an operating system on it.
I install Partition Magic, it tells me that my current C drive is now 2 gigs instead of 8, and I have 37 gigs of unpartitioned space. :eek:
I just went, clicked on the unpartitioned space (I’m typing this message on my wife’s computer) chose undelete, and what do you know, it just undeleted my original 8 gig drive I put aside for Windows 98 originally :dubious: .
I’m still screwed. :frowning:

So, to recap, I have a 2 gig partition with Windows 98, a 28 gig partition that’s empty :mad: and an 8 gig partition that’s probably empty too since I have a feeling that I just installed Windows 98 over 2 gigs of my Windows XP partition!

So, is there any way I can save my data and possibly restore my partition? (And yes, I know, in the future, back up my hard drive).

#2

What I ment by that was, neither my Windows 98se CD nor my floppy boot disk would work. My floppy apparently got damaged somehow.

#3

Did you have winXP installed as NTFS by any chance?

This might be a reason for some of your problems.
AFAIK DOS will not format in FAT32 there is a version that will, the reason I’m fairly certain of that is because Norton Ghost creates a rescue bootable DOS disc that works on NTFS or FAT32 as the user specifies. I expect this is an ofshoot of mainstream DOS but it does show that this is possible and other utlilities might have something similar.

#4

I think the trouble may have been in your FAT conversion process and some pecularities of the FAT partitioning system. See Hard Drive Size Limitations and Barriers In Depth IIRC FAT16 could only see to about 2 gigs or so per partition.

Why PM or the OS was telling you you had formatted the entire 8 gigs as one partition with FAT16 is unknown to me. If you then changed the FAT16 to FAT32 and were converting that partition it should not have been any more than two gigs, so what the system is telling you (currently) is correct, the puzzle is why it told you you had formatted a 8 gig FAT16 partition.

I think installing the drive as a slave to a system with PM already installed on it is the best way to see if you can recapture your original XP partition as you seem to have compromised the integrity of the bootable partitions.

#5

Windows 98se on the disk has PM and it doesn’t help. Neither does the floppy PM rescue disks.

And as for DOS format, I’m sorry if I confused you. No, obviously it only formatted 2 gigs, but for some reason in Partition Magic, instead of having my 8 gig partition be 2 gigs used, and 6 gigs unused, the 2 gigs is one drive, then it undeleted an 8 gig partition.

I don’t know if this means that DOS and Win98 wrote over my XP partition, they shouldn’t have, since it was supposed to be hidden and all they could see was the 8 gig one, or if they only worked with the 8 gig partition, and Partition Magic took some space from the XP partition…wait, never mind. This is a little confusing and I’m really frustrated right now.

Crap, if I can’t save my XP partition and have to reinstall it, those greedy bast*rds at MS will probably charge me money for another licence since to them, it’ll look like I’m installing the same version of XP on another computer. Great.

#6

If you can find a PC with XP and you have the latest version of PM that works with XP, you might have a better chance for PM to be able to diagnose and deal with the problem if you slave your drive to that XP machine (and PM is installed on it) vs having the 98 partition try to boot, diagnose and fix itself with the onboard PM.

#7

Oh, and also, it was supposed to be the XP partition was at the beginning of the drive, and the Fat32 was supposed to be at the end, but now, it’s 2 gigs of Fat32 at the beginning, and the unallocated drive at the end. And if I undelete the 8 gig drive, it’s at the end, so I’m pretty sure now that PM screwed up and let DOS and 98 write over the XP partition.

#8

I was typing that last post before you sent this one.

Anyway, I see what you’re saying, and I’ll give a try.