I did something very silly with my PC

zilog_jones

I recently got a 80 gig hard drive for my lame old PIII. I put on win2k first, and then added Mandrakelinux 10.0 on the 10GB of unformatted space I left for it. I also made another primary partition, but this time in FAT32 so I could put WIn98SE on too and finally be able to play all my crappy old Win95 and DOS games again.

That's were things went wrong. I know now I should have done that bit first. First Win98 didn't want to install because it didn't seem to like the other NTFS partitions. After some Googling I got some program that seemed to change the boot sector to its own special thingy, and with that I was able to "hide" the primary WIn2k partition and Windows 98 actually installed after that.

But after rebooting things went really wrong - Win98 had changed the boot sector to its own thing, and it installed fine on the 4GB FAT32 partition, but it seemed to mess up all the other partitions. It says that that partition is C:, but after installing there was suddenly this weird mystery drive - it appeared to be the same size as the primary Win2k partition - even the free space looked the same, but it supposedly had nothing in it and was called "Win98" for some reason.

I thought Linux would be able to save the day, so I tried the copy of Madrake Move (one of those distros that runs straight off a CD) i had and looked at the HD with its partitiony thing. It showed a really big FAT32 partition in place of the one primary and 3 logical NTFS partitions I origianlly had, the FAT32 partition which I originally made and had WIn98 on it, and just 10GB of space were Linux was supposed to be. It also said the partitions were overlapping or something odd.

Basically, is there anything I can do to get everything else back? Well I'm not too bothered about Linux (I hadn't done anything with it yet since I only put it on the day before), but I really hope all the NTFS stuff isn't lost...

Fenster

Well I did something similar at the weekend and the simplest way I found to fix it was to create a windows PE disc, boot in with that and back up key files to dvd/pen drive. After that I booted with the Suse Linxu setup disc (I use XP Pro and Suse Linux) as it has a great partition manager and wiped them all.

Then I just put XP pro back on and rebuilt my system from there. Odds are your stuff could be gone. FAT32 is probably the culprit and also that Windows doesn't like more than four partitions from what I've seen.

CapBean

The reason the os's went tits up is that you installed them in the wrong order.
All early windows os's expect to be installed first so they can take the primary drive letter namely C:

When installing Win2K or NT, it will first check the C: drive to see if you have an old os and will then ask if you wish to keep it or overwrite it.

If you keep the old os then Win2k or NT will install on the next available drive letter / partition.

Then you can install the Linux os.

The installing order should be as follows,
prepare the drive into the required partitions, for 3 os's 3 partitions etc.
then install old os. Win9x etc.,
then install NT, Win2k,
then install Linux.

I hope you did a backup before installing your os's .
I 'd say you've overwritten the File allocation tables on the disk.
You wont be able to retrieve any of your files.

It’s a reformat and repartition for you I’m afraid.

zilog_jones

I expected more from you people! Even before writing that post I searched the web and found several programs that can fix partition tables, and Linux or Win2k can fix the MBR easily. I just didn't know which were actually good as I had never come across these programs before.

I do have nearly everything backed up, but I am really not in the mood to get out my two old hard disks and about 20 CDs to copy all that stuff that is potentially still there on the hard disk totally untouched.

Win98 (and the boot disk) recognised the 4GB FAT32 partition that I already made with Win2k before all this as its "C:" - it doesn't matter about the other OSs. And it only put data onto that partition - it couldn't have touched anything else, except for the boot record and the partition table.

The prospect of just fixing the partition table just seems a damn sight better than spending about 20 hours installing OSs and copying data again. I can even remember exactly where all the partitions were (except the Linux ones which I don't care too much about).

And Fenster - yes, you can only have a max. of four primary partitions on a hard disk, but I had three primary partitions, three NTFS logical partitions and two logical Linux ones. You can have as many logical ones as you want - well there might be a limit of like 32 or something but that's just getting very silly.

CapBean

Have you tried the recovery programs yet?
If you have, how did it go?
Have you recovered all or even part of your data yet?
I'm interested to find out.

Spunj

I'm not going to try to solve your problem but I'd like to point you in the direction of some tools that have helped me with similar problems.
You can download the basic suite from http://www.911cd.net and there are plenty of links there to other tools that can be built into the cd.

edit: damn I just tried the site and it seems to be down, Googles cache gives this:

Hello Everyone.

My name is Eddie. I have been hosting 911cd.net for the past year. I know everyone has seen some problems the last couple of months. For that, I apologize. I have leased a new server from a better company. Hopefully, this will eliminate all of the problems we have had here. I had suspended this site to prevent loss of forum data as I move everything over to the new server. Once the DNS propogates, you should see the site instead of this message. If you can't wait, go to http://69.73.175.110/~cd911/forums/.

I go by Eagle1 in the forums. I am trying to save up for my own server. This will mean a faster, more reliable machine for these site I host. And for me it means a much lower monthly cost, which is nice as I don't make any money doing this. I had started by asking for donations. I have now decided on a better approach. I am going to raffle off a brand new HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer). It will run the new Meedio (http://www.meedio.com) software which should be released this month. It will be worth at least $2000.00. I will sell 1000 tickets at $5.00 each. I will post a website with all the specs as soon as I can. If you want more info before then, write to me at (eddie at seelke dot net).

Thanks, Eddie

tomk

Try gpart and see what it gives you. The website has all the details on what it does and how to use it.