MBR Repair. . Help Pls:)

[Fiveohhh]

Well this after noon,I was taking my old main HD out and replacing it, afet I got transferred to the new hard drive(with a clean install of xp pro) everything i wanted, I used Partition magic to delete the old partitions, and set the new drive to active( not sure what that meant, but PM told me to do it) it rebooted, did its thing, rebooted again, and said it couldn't find NTLDR, so I booted with my win98 startup disk, and it coudn't see the drives. so than I booted up with the win xp floppies, and went into the repair option, and it say both the partitions. So I played around in there for a while I used the fixboot and fixmbr command(not sure what I did again) and also used a command to set the root directory to the main drive(forgot what it was or where I heard thats what the command did). When I restarted my computer again, it got right to where it starts to boot, and reset, and kept repeating it. so I had an old drive around that I put xp on, and when I go to xp, I can see the drive both partitions, and the files, and do as I please with them. But when I boot using a win 98 floppy it can't see my drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated. read a few articles on MBR repair, but made no sense to me Thanks in advance for anything you may be able to help me with.

 

[minendo]

Am I understanding correctly you have winxp on the drive, but you are unable to boot into it? If so, what you can do is from a DOS prompt type in fdisk /mbr and then restart the computer. WinXP will then create a new MBR and you should be good to go.

 

[ThaGrandCow]

what minendo said

 

[Fiveohhh]

The thing is in DOS I can't see the drive. The only drives it sees is my cdr, dvd, floppy, and the one I' just made so I could boot into windows and see if I can see the drive. It works fine in explorer, but not in DOS. My bios detects it fine when it checks. heres a basic rundown of whats hooked up, since i can't explain my problem very well.

1 100gb wd drive with 2 partitions. The first was bootable(win xp pro), the second wasn't

1 1.5gb with winxp pro(using it now)

in XP both partitions of the 100gb drive are readable and I can transfer files and remove files fine, but when I boot with my win98 startup disk only the 1.5gb drive can be accessed

When I booted with xp pro floppies, i could use the recovery console I could access the 100gb drive. tried fixboot and fixmbr(i think that was the command) than restarted and when I booted the drive. right after the bios posted, and windows started loading, it restarts, and keeps restarting at that spot till i cut the power.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[obenton]

It's not clear, exactly, what you did with your partition manipulations, but NT varieties will not start if the original drive letter gets changed. As far as viewing your original XP partition, if it's NTFS format then it's not visible in win98 (DOS).

 

[Fiveohhh]

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but basically I just want to be able to boot off htis drive, is there any program that can make it happen while in windows?, since the drive is recognized while in windows. right now, I'm working off this 1.5gb thats really slow, and really wanna get in the fast lane again.

 

[obenton]

It's likely that removing partitions changed the drive letter. You could put the old partitions back to restore the proper drive letter, but then you'd be back where you started. There are repairs for changed drive letters, described by Microsoft in a Knowledge Base article, but it's complicated and includes tricky registry edits. Also, MS recommends it only in order to be able to boot so you can copy your data from the drive before you reformat and reinstall. So, unless someone comes up with a better suggestion, my advice would be to save your data, using the OS on your small drive, and then reformat and reinstall.

 

[Fiveohhh]

Thanks a bunch thats what I was kinda figuring I'd have to do. think it would be possble to just reformat one partition, and boot from there, since most of my backups are on the 2nd partition anyway. . . thanks

 

[bjc112]

<< It's not clear, exactly, what you did with your partition manipulations, but NT varieties will not start if the original drive letter gets changed. As far as viewing your original XP partition, if it's NTFS format then it's not visible in win98 (DOS). >>




Are you sure about that? if boot up my 98 startup disk.. i can view my NTFS partitions...

(may-b we aren't on the same page though

)

 

[Fiveohhh]

I used to be able to see it also, so not sure where the problem lies, gonna do a refomat in a few days, after I get it all backed up



<<

<< It's not clear, exactly, what you did with your partition manipulations, but NT varieties will not start if the original drive letter gets changed. As far as viewing your original XP partition, if it's NTFS format then it's not visible in win98 (DOS). >>




Are you sure about that? if boot up my 98 startup disk.. i can view my NTFS partitions...

(may-b we aren't on the same page though

) >>