Help Needed Asap

PowerHouseDan

right i Partitioned my Hd with partition magic and went into pq boot by mistake and click on boot other partition ie with nothin on it,so i install xp pro on it,but i cant change back to my normal xp home which is drive c: and it was loading drive e: how can i change this

Fenster

I did that accidently a week or so back. I think its a bug. In my case it "hid" all the partitions on the drive so while they were visible they couldn't be accessed. After much banging my head off the wall, I just installed windows on a spare partition and installed PM. Right click on the other partitions on the drive and select "Unhide" from the right-click menu.

After this though, my windows installation was damaged-all your data will be intact though, so just reinstall windows without formatting to get back in if your machine won't boot. You'll get an error about a bunch of files in /windows/system32/ being missing.

Someone will probably butt in now with a quick, simple fix, but this is how I did it.

PowerHouseDan

well its starts to loads and i get blue screen error etc,winsrv error if i reinstall might fix it,i tried to reinstall windows over it but said cannot install win xp on this partition

Fenster

powerhousedan wrote:

well its starts to loads and i get blue screen error etc,winsrv error if i reinstall might fix it,i tried to reinstall windows over it but said cannot install win xp on this partition

Yeah, its exactly the problem I had. Hmm...have you any free partition on your machine?

Once again, someone will probably jump in with a quick, fast solution, but the next line would be to find someone with a Windows PE disc, or even a Linux disc.

PowerHouseDan

alrite here is now the problem reinstalled windows repaired basicily now after setup install files it restart and the normal windows xp install windows comes up but doesnt move at all just starts at 39min left cdrom or hard drive is not working but the pages stil move etc?

Dun

Fenster wrote:

After much banging my head off the wall, I just installed windows on a spare partition and installed PM. Right click on the other partitions on the drive and select "Unhide" from the right-click menu.

After this though, my windows installation was damaged-all your data will be intact though, so just reinstall windows without formatting to get back in if your machine won't boot. You'll get an error about a bunch of files in /windows/system32/ being missing.

Someone will probably butt in now with a quick, simple fix, but this is how I did it.

[butt]Rather than re-installing windows over itself, you boot to the recovery console and edit your boot.ini to point to the correct partition. This is no good when the deed is done (unless you've access to another computer) but you should really make yourself a set of PM boot disks (there's 2 in a set). You can run PM off the floppies. Then you'd just have to unhide the relevant partition and edit your boot.ini (again with the recover console off your XP CD).

Dun

powerhousedan wrote:

alrite here is now the problem reinstalled windows repaired basicily now after setup install files it restart and the normal windows xp install windows comes up but doesnt move at all just starts at 39min left cdrom or hard drive is not working but the pages stil move etc?

Same thing happened me today. Just power off the computer, turn it back on and hope it carries on from where it left off. You'd be surprised how many times that works.

Fenster

Dun wrote:

[butt]Rather than re-installing windows over itself, you boot to the recovery console and edit your boot.ini to point to the correct partition. This is no good when the deed is done (unless you've access to another computer) but you should really make yourself a set of PM boot disks (there's 2 in a set). You can run PM off the floppies. Then you'd just have to unhide the relevant partition and edit your boot.ini (again with the recover console off your XP CD).

Believe me, I tried that. The partition isn't acessible or bootable. The windows installer won't touch the partition and the recovery console doesn't "see" c:\windows

fenris

another option if you are feeling brave is to use fdisk on a linux bootdisk to correct the mess, it is probably something really simple - like marking the correct partition bootable or active.

A liveCD distribution like knoppix is the way to go as it will let you check your data still exists before you attempt heroics - nothing worse than heroics for the sake of no data.

tweaking boot.ini (from within knoppix or a.n.other O/S) is an option, but you are better off solving the root problem rather than curing some of the symptoms.

boot.ini example line

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

make sure you count your partitions properly !

Good luck

PowerHouseDan

i had to go to plan z format and reinstall,backed up my mp3s and vidz last week onto xbox but put them onto pc last nite for space on the xbox so lost my 15000 odd mp3s,I am pissed,

Zonko

I used this partition software I got on a disc.. and it completly ****ed all my booting, so I had to format both my HDD's and now, once I get windows/apps/games/Linux instaleld again, my RAM dies on me! >:(

Cabaal

Zonko wrote:

I used this partition software I got on a disc.. and it completly ****ed all my booting, so I had to format both my HDD's and now, once I get windows/apps/games/Linux instaleld again, my RAM dies on me! >:(

ohhhhhhhh the funs of life