I did away with my dual-boot (Win98SE/Win2K) in favor of installing a brand new HD and installing Win2K by itself. I have 4 HDs and disconnected all of them but the new one to do the install. After getting Win2K, SP2, drivers and other basic stuff installed and tweaked, I reconnected the other drives to really get rolling.
Here's how the drives are installed and split:
#1: 40GB - one part
#2: 40GB - 4-8GB parts, 8GB unformatted (I was gonna use this for dual-boot, but never got to setting up Linux)
#3: 30GB - one part
#4: 20GB - 3 parts
Because I had a bunch of redundant primary partitions on the #2 and #4 (as I added HDs to the rig, the old ones were demoted and the OS was reinstalled on the new #1 drive), I wanted to use PM6 to convert those to plain extended partitions (so the drive letters would cascade naturally) and to make #2 into 4-10gig partitions. All drives will be FAT32.
Well, it did the #4 conversion OK, but when it moved to convert the first part on #2, it ran a while (I was about to go to bed and let it run while I slept) when I noticed that the computer had FROZEN! (Uh-oh...) No screensavers were on and no other apps were running. I haven't even gotten around to installing anti-virus and utilities.
After rebooting, PM shows the partition in yellow ("other" format or "PqRP" format) and Windows doesn't see it at all. The Help file basically says, "Call PQ tech support." (thanks for nothing) and a search of Deja shows that this happens to others and that it MAY be recoverable by using the PM6 Rescue tools to manually edit the partition info or switch it back to FAT32.
Unfortunately, when I try to to boot with the Rescue Disk, it promptly give the error, "NTLDR missing" and won't boot at all. Deja posts make it sound like you shouldn't be able to boot Win2K at all without it, but the system starts fine. I don't see this file on the floppy, so WTF?!?
I had MOST of the data I wanted burned off the lost partition, BUT there was some stuff that I wanted to copy over (WebShots packs, recent e-mail and letters, etc.) so I'd REALLY like to reclaim this. Also, I TERRIFIED that if this happens to the other partitions, that I'll lose more irreplacable stuff that was too scattered to backup safely.
Any brilliant suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Here's how the drives are installed and split:
#1: 40GB - one part
#2: 40GB - 4-8GB parts, 8GB unformatted (I was gonna use this for dual-boot, but never got to setting up Linux)
#3: 30GB - one part
#4: 20GB - 3 parts
Because I had a bunch of redundant primary partitions on the #2 and #4 (as I added HDs to the rig, the old ones were demoted and the OS was reinstalled on the new #1 drive), I wanted to use PM6 to convert those to plain extended partitions (so the drive letters would cascade naturally) and to make #2 into 4-10gig partitions. All drives will be FAT32.
Well, it did the #4 conversion OK, but when it moved to convert the first part on #2, it ran a while (I was about to go to bed and let it run while I slept) when I noticed that the computer had FROZEN! (Uh-oh...) No screensavers were on and no other apps were running. I haven't even gotten around to installing anti-virus and utilities.
After rebooting, PM shows the partition in yellow ("other" format or "PqRP" format) and Windows doesn't see it at all. The Help file basically says, "Call PQ tech support." (thanks for nothing) and a search of Deja shows that this happens to others and that it MAY be recoverable by using the PM6 Rescue tools to manually edit the partition info or switch it back to FAT32.
Unfortunately, when I try to to boot with the Rescue Disk, it promptly give the error, "NTLDR missing" and won't boot at all. Deja posts make it sound like you shouldn't be able to boot Win2K at all without it, but the system starts fine. I don't see this file on the floppy, so WTF?!?
I had MOST of the data I wanted burned off the lost partition, BUT there was some stuff that I wanted to copy over (WebShots packs, recent e-mail and letters, etc.) so I'd REALLY like to reclaim this. Also, I TERRIFIED that if this happens to the other partitions, that I'll lose more irreplacable stuff that was too scattered to backup safely.
Any brilliant suggestions? Thanks in advance!
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