Can't Boot Partitions

[kye199]

One of my computer illiterate family members decided to partion their 40 g FAT32 hard drive into 35 gigs of FAT32 for win 98 and tried to setup 5 gig or NTFS for win 2k. But in doing so with Partition Magic 6 they couldn't find their new partitioned drive after it rebooted and all so went back into partition magic and saw that the new partition was unactive and logical and not primary. So they set it to primary thus having both drives primary and now Windows 98 won't boot up. What can I do to fix this? I tired booting with the Win98 disk and it said the drive was damaged and couldn't be formatted, I also tried witht the Win 2k disk eventhough it's not installed yet. I have no idea.

Thanks

Now we're rockin like dokken!

 

[jc14all]

Did the family member create an emergency recovery disk in Partition Magic 6.0 when they installed the program? If not you will have to use your Win98 startup disk to boot then use FDisk to delete the unwanted partition.

Then when you get back into Win98, use Partition Magic to create a primary logical, active partition (I think 2 GB is the limit) for Win2k. Then when it reboots, bootup with the Win2k CD ROM and install. During the install direct Win2k to the partition you created, you will be asked if you want to convert the parttition to NTFS/FAT32. Decide which is best for you, and proceed with the install. After the install of Win2k is complete you can now dual boot to either OS. Boot back into Win98, go into Partition Magic and now you will be able to resize the Win2k partition to a larger size. Good luck.

JC-------<*){{{>{~~~~~
Fisher of men

 

[kye199]

JC,
I do have a emergency Partition Magic disk I used it and I get a #104 error saying it was a bad partition. So I can't do anything there. Then I went into FDISK and it says there is only 1 drive, so there is nothing to delete. Would it help if I took my drives to another computer and tried to format them from there?

Now we're rockin like dokken!

 

[DOOM]

I doubt putting your drive in another computer would help.

You only have one physical hard drive, correct? And it has 2 partitions on it?

Run FDISK, and check to see if you have logical drives in an extended partition. If so, you need to delete the logical drives before you can remove the extended partition. Once you've deleted the extended partition, you can delete the primary one and you'll have a clean slate, to set up however you want.

If you have more than one physical disk, but you can't view all of them in FDISK, ensure that all drives are jumpered correctly for master/slave operation, plugged in and powered, and that BIOS is set to autodetect all drives.

If you still can't get anything to work, try downloading the low-level format routine from your HD's manufacturer. It is a program that restores the physical surface of the disk to its initial factory state. Then you can set up your partitions on the blank drive(s). If THAT doesn't work, congratulations, you have a new doorstop.

I am assuming that you don't need to save any of the data on the disk, as deleting partitions permanently erases all data. If you need to rescue data, take it in to a professional data recovery place.



-DOOM
"Ultimately, there is no knowledge -- only belief."