Well, I have a question, is using fixmbr in recovery console the same as fdisk /mbr ? If not, maybe try that to write a new mbr (using your xp disk).
I did that. It didn’t change anything.
Unless somebody else comes up with any bright ideas, I think you may have to give up on booting this again. If that is so, my next step would be to remove the 40Gig HD, put in the 10Gig one and install XP on it (just a minimal install). Then, I’d put in your 40Gig and see if your new version can access the data on it.
Sorry to hear you got bad advice, Cisco. Hope everyone’s learned a lesson here.
[soapbox]
Before you make any major changes to your file system, back up your data. Back up your Windows registry before making any changes. Back up your data before installing new hardware. Backup methods have never been easier or less expensive. Take advantage of that fact. [/soapbox]
I hope you can get your data back, and if not, that you didn’t lose anything critical. I’m sorry I don’t know how to fix what’s broke – I’ve got a stupid Linux partition on my system, too, and I don’t know how to get rid of the damn thing either.
…:eek:…
Did you try repairing the installation by reinstalling, like we talked about earlier, Cisco?
On second thought, since someone else might run into this thread in the future, this is the other method I was suggesting he try.
Yes, and it doesn’t give me the option for some reason.
From the site you linked me to:
Have we established whether the 30GB partition has been set as the active partition? I’m pretty sure fdisk /mbr doesn’t affect which partition is active. You need to run fdisk, with no parameters, to find out.
This is weird…booting from a floppy and running fdisk shows the A drive as the only partition.
FDISK is for hard disks only. Are you sure you’re not reading the A in the Status column (A for Active)?
I’m not sure. I’m incredibly frustrated with this…I just need to get this computer booted. I have data on here I CANNOT lose.
All I was trying to say with the other post, even if you cannot get this drive to boot again, the data is still on there and can be recovered. If the partition table is okay, all you have to do is add this disk to an already working system and it will automatically be registered as another drive, then simply copy the data to the working system. If the partition table is hosed, it is more difficult, but it can be rebuilt and recovered, see this product filerecovery.biz.
First, let’s see if you can get fdisk to find this drive.
If you physically changed how your HD’s were plugged in, is your bios detecting your HD correctly? If your bios was not set to auto-detect IDE devices, it might be trying to use your old configuration and hence can’t find it properly. I would set all IDE detection to automatic in the bios so it can find any HD’s regardless if they have been moved.
If you are not sure you can see the disk with fdisk, why don’t you add the 10Gig HD in again and go fdisk. That way you’ll know how the partitions should show up. If you can only see the 10Gig HD and not the 40Gig, your partition has problems. Look at the link above to see how to deal with this.
At this point, this is what I would do (but this advice comes without warranty, as it were).
As I understand it, you have two disks. One had Linux on (10 gig), and is now doing nothing. One has Windows XP on (30 gig), and I am quite sure still contains all your data. Remove this drive, wrap it in cotton wool and put it in a bank vault or something (I exaggerate, obviously). I would seriously not do anything else to this drive until you have recovered your data.
Configure the 10 gig drive as the primary master, and install a fresh copy of XP on it. When this is done, configure your 30 gig drive as the primary slave and reconnect it on the same cable as the 10 gig drive. Copy all the irreplaceable data on to the 10 gig. If you have any sort of CD writer, now might be a good time to make some proper backups too.
You should now have a) a working WinXP installation and b) your data. You now have a choice; either splat the disk that originally had XP on it and use the 10 gig as your system disk from now on, with the 30 gig as storage, or unplug the 10 gig and continue trying to resurrect your original XP install. Since fixmbr has apparently failed, I don’t know how to do this, so unless your 10gig drive is really crappy, I’d suggest just living with it. WinXP can live in 10 gigs perfectly happily, and you can configure your documents directories to be on the second disk. Hope this helps…
I hope the mods don’t mind me bumping this considering the circumstances. It’s been almost 3 months since I started this thread and my computer is still absolutely unbootable. I’ve been using my girlfriend’s laptop ever since then.
Here’s the current situation: I took the 30gb drive to my brother’s house and put everything I could fit onto his HD. The 10gb drive is still full and I have nowhere to put the stuff that is on it. The 30gb has been formatted several times but the computer is absolutely unbootable and the system freezes when trying to install Win98, WinXP Home, WinXP Pro, Mandrake Linux, SUSE Linux, Debian Linux, and various CDROM bootable Linuxes.
I just saw this thread for the first time.
Depending on how old the motherboard and BIOS are, a 30GB drive may be too big to be bootable. In some cases you can (with total data loss), repartition the drive with a 2GB primary partition (as long as it’s the first physical partition), and the rest of the space as an extended partition.
Another (unlikely) possibility is that by awful coincidence, the hard drive or IDE controller decided to fail at that time. Can the computer boot with just the 10GB disk installed?
Another possibility is the CMOS settings have become corrupt. The fact you can’t boot anything now, even from CD implies the issue isn’t confined to the 30GB drive. If yuo can get as far as the BOIS setup screen, write down every setting in every submenu and then choose the option to reset all to factory defaults.
Is it possible you’ve inadvertantly jiggled a connector loose, or bumped one of the SIMMS loose? I don’t know whether you’re a hardware expert or total novice, but it’s easy to kink a ribbon cable and end up with an intermittent short to ground or between lines, or to have the connector partly pulled out at the motherboard end.
If you can’t fix it at all, and you want to send me the computer, I’ll take a look at it and see if I can get it to boot back to WinXP. I haven’t had this kind of thing beat me yet, and I’m only one state away if you really are in Phoenix.
Alternately, I think we’re going to Phoenix sometime around Thanksgiving; I might be able to stop by with a couple spare 100GB drives and my CD set.
I’ve seen this before. First off you need to read up about ARC codes.
Second, set the jumpers on your drive to be the Primary Master and amend the BIOS accordingly.
Third, boot off your XP CD, go to the Recovery Console, and edit boot.ini appropriately.
Mine looks like
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)**rdisk(0)**partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)**rdisk(0)**partition(1)\WINDOWS=“Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT=“Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” /cmdcons
My guess is that yours looks like
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)**rdisk(1)**partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)**rdisk(1)**partition(1)\WINDOWS=“Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
or some other number for rdisk as XP was installed on the second physical disk.