Okay, so I've gotten myself into quite the pickle.
My problem is that WinXP SP2 can no longer see 2 out of 3 partitions on my main hard drive. It can see the Windows (C partition just fine, but the D: and E: partitions have both disappeared and now say "unallocated space" in Disk Management. So this is how I got to this situation...
My system was running WinXP SP2 just fine with two IDE Maxtor drives, both connected to the primary IDE channel. I was doing some stuff in the registry in order to remove all Microsoft Intellipoint mouse driver entries, following this guide: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321122/EN-US/
When I restarted my computer, suddenly I was greeted with the dreaded error "Hard Disk Boot Failure Insert System Disk Press Enter". I tried a number of steps, like going into bios and checking the boot order, unplugging the slave drive. Finally I booted up my WinXP CD and went into recovery manager.
I tried CHKDSK /P and FIXBOOT on C:\, and both tools reported they fixed some errors but neither of them fixed the boot failure problem. Finally I ran FIXMBR on C:\ and voila, I could boot back into WinXP!
But now I'm stuck in my present situation. After fixing the master boot record, it seems that I've "lost" my D: and E: partitions. My WinXP C: partition is fine, as is my slave drive F: which is all data. I'm really hoping there is an easy way to fix my problem -- please don't tell my all my programs and data are lost!
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
My problem is that WinXP SP2 can no longer see 2 out of 3 partitions on my main hard drive. It can see the Windows (C partition just fine, but the D: and E: partitions have both disappeared and now say "unallocated space" in Disk Management. So this is how I got to this situation...
My system was running WinXP SP2 just fine with two IDE Maxtor drives, both connected to the primary IDE channel. I was doing some stuff in the registry in order to remove all Microsoft Intellipoint mouse driver entries, following this guide: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321122/EN-US/
When I restarted my computer, suddenly I was greeted with the dreaded error "Hard Disk Boot Failure Insert System Disk Press Enter". I tried a number of steps, like going into bios and checking the boot order, unplugging the slave drive. Finally I booted up my WinXP CD and went into recovery manager.
I tried CHKDSK /P and FIXBOOT on C:\, and both tools reported they fixed some errors but neither of them fixed the boot failure problem. Finally I ran FIXMBR on C:\ and voila, I could boot back into WinXP!
But now I'm stuck in my present situation. After fixing the master boot record, it seems that I've "lost" my D: and E: partitions. My WinXP C: partition is fine, as is my slave drive F: which is all data. I'm really hoping there is an easy way to fix my problem -- please don't tell my all my programs and data are lost!
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
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