Windows XP OS not found!

[brunswickite]

OK so i have 2 harddrives, a 30 gig with windows XP on it, and a 20 gig with windows 2k partition into 2 10 gigs

so last night i was thinking i dont need the windows 2k partition, so i open up partition magic and format it, i dont create the rescue disks either.

so when it pm finishes, my computer does not boot up, it keeps asking for a boot disk, as sees No OS,

I set the windows XP harddrive to the first boot but it does not find it. Now i am in a jam, I will either loose all the the data on my 20 gig partition by loading an OS on it that i just formatted or figure out a way to have the OS be seen.

The windows 2k was the D drive
and the windows XP was the C drive

if that mattered


thanks for help

 

[Crusty]

Boot with the WinXP CD and goto the recovery console and do a fixmbr.

Should fix your problem.

 

[Tash]

what was his problem? and what does 'fixmbr' do to fix it? Just curious, so I can learn something here.

 

[asb002]

Did you erase the Windows XP partition instead of the 2k one?

 

[brunswickite]

nope i am trying the fixmbr right now

 

[rrrssssss]

I had a very similar problem only to find out that Drive Image by Power Quest marked my XP partition as hidden after I did a restore. In my case, I simply "unhid" my XP partition and it worked fine.

 

[Broken]

I did something similar to that, except WinXP/Win Server 2003 AMD 64 version. When rebooting hit F8 and then choose last known good configuration. It will then give you choice of two OS's to boot from. Choose XP and voila!

 

[wxjunkie]

Originally posted by: Tash
what was his problem? and what does 'fixmbr' do to fix it? Just curious, so I can learn something here.

'fixmbr' stands for 'fix master boot record'

Sometimes the small few megs on the front of a hard drive - which tell the computer which operating systems are active and which partition and disks they're on - get's fudged.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: wxjunkie
Sometimes the small few megs on the front of a hard drive - which tell the computer which operating systems are active and which partition and disks they're on - get's fudged.

Much less than a few megs... 512 bytes actually. Most of which contains the disk's partition table, and the end of which contains a bit of code telling the BIOS where it should look to continue the boot process from there.

The MBR is basically pretty dumb. For all-MS systems, all it does is tell the BIOS to proceed to the partition marked "active" (or "bootable"). It only generally becomes a problem in 2 cases: 1) you've added or changed the order of disks, so that the MBR that used to read by the BIOS is now skipped over, or 2) you've had Linux or another non-MS OS install its own code to the MBR, and you're no longer proceeding to the "active" partition as you expected.

In the OP's case, it's not perfectly clear whether the MBR is the problem. It kind of depends on what order everything was installed in, and on how the BIOS was configured. Hard to tell without more information...