Wrong partition active

Discussion in 'Storage Devices' started by brianosaur, Jan 5, 2006.

  1. brianosaur

    brianosaur Geek Trainee

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    I inadvertantly made a partition on my non-o/s secondary HDD "active" when I was trying to resize it. Now XP doesn't boot of course.

    What should I do?
     
  2. JimBowen

    JimBowen Guest

    Hi Brianosaur


    a question:

    Do you have the hdd's setup in a RAID array?

    If they are not setup in a RAID array, then it sounds like the reason maybe that you secondary hardrive is actually the master drive? because if it was a secondary drive then windows would not be booting from it, it would boot from the master drive.

    Can you access the BIOS???
     
  3. megamaced

    megamaced Geek Geek Geek!

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    I am assuming you can't boot into your computer at all.

    What i'm about to tell you will work in a FAT32 environment - but it may work on NTFS as well.

    1) You will need to get a bootable floppy disk of DOS. The best place to go is www.bootdisk.com. Download the Windows 98SE startup disk and copy the contents to a floppy.

    2) Restart your computer with the floppy disk inserted. You will need to make sure the floppy drive is your first bootable disk in the CMOS setup.

    3) You will be taken to a screen that asks whether you'd like CD-ROM support. You can answer however you like, it doesn't matter.

    4) Once at the commmand prompt, type fdisk. Click YES to enable large disk support.

    5) You will now be presented with a list of options. I think option 2 is to make a partition active. From here you can select the partition to be active.
     
  4. brianosaur

    brianosaur Geek Trainee

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    Fdisk doesn't work for ntfs and I am set up with a raid.
    I tried to fixboot and fixmbr in rec console but that didnt work
    "Last known good configuration" didn't work either
     
  5. megamaced

    megamaced Geek Geek Geek!

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    Although FDISK can't read NTFS partitions, it can see they exist. I'm fairly sure you can make the partition active anyway.

    You could try the 'repair windows XP' option on the Windows XP Install CD
     

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