Reformatting

[Raven_Writer]

Would running fixmbr work (given the fact that I'd be running it off a CD *recovery CD*)?

[Greg]

I have encountered this problem the first time I repartitioned the drive too I was really scared and wiped the drive. As I found out later I didnt have to... I think what you are experiencing is similar.

I used Partition Magic, but your software may support this too. Basically, the problem is that you cant' have more than 4 primary paritions. If you try to create more, some programs will "help out" and change the fs type of one of the partitions. To the program such a partition will appear as "hidden". To Windows it will appear to be garbage. Sometimes this change happens even with fewer than 4 partitions on the disk.

What can you do to fix this? In Partition Magic there is an option under "advanced" to "unhide" the partition. If you use some other program, there is probably something similar. If not, all you have to do is manually change the partition type in the partition table. There should be programs available for manual partition table editing.

This may also be a problem with your Grub configuration. It may help to take a look at the grub.conf file (it may also be called menu.lst).

[Raven_Writer]

Originally Posted by Greg

I have encountered this problem the first time I repartitioned the drive too I was really scared and wiped the drive. As I found out later I didnt have to... I think what you are experiencing is similar.

I used Partition Magic, but your software may support this too. Basically, the problem is that you cant' have more than 4 primary paritions. If you try to create more, some programs will "help out" and change the fs type of one of the partitions. To the program such a partition will appear as "hidden". To Windows it will appear to be garbage. Sometimes this change happens even with fewer than 4 partitions on the disk.

What can you do to fix this? In Partition Magic there is an option under "advanced" to "unhide" the partition. If you use some other program, there is probably something similar. If not, all you have to do is manually change the partition type in the partition table. There should be programs available for manual partition table editing.

This may also be a problem with your Grub configuration. It may help to take a look at the grub.conf file (it may also be called menu.lst).

I did use PartitionMagic. My problem is that I can't run it now (I tried, using WINE, and it said that it can't find or open some driver file).

[Raven_Writer]

** Update Idea **

I was browsing Google for the nth time in the past 2 days **, and came across this:

http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/0...booting91.html

Does anyone know if this would work?

[Ryan M.]

It might possibly. Try it, it won't hurt anything.

[Raven_Writer]

I did try this, and it didn't seem to work (dunno why).

I followed the steps completely, and and said something like "Driver Update Status: *something that I forgot*".

[Joe Ross]

"fixing" the mbr won't help you at all. It will only remove grub
(which allows you to boot into either SUSE or windows) and will only
let you boot into windows, which is broken.

[Raven_Writer]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

"fixing" the mbr won't help you at all. It will only remove grub
(which allows you to boot into either SUSE or windows) and will only
let you boot into windows, which is broken.

Yea, I read more on this on Microsoft's website also, and it said it might make everything worse anyways.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Raven_Writer

I did use PartitionMagic. My problem is that I can't run it now (I tried, using WINE, and it said that it can't find or open some driver file).

If you used Partition Magic, then this is (almost) certainly the problem you are having. Now to get into Partition Magic...

When you installed Partition Magic it asked you to make boot floppies. If you had those, you could boot into dos with a dos version of Partition Magic running. But i think you said you dont have a floppy drive. Try this. Have someone install Partition Magic and make the disks. Then burn a bootable cd with dos on it, and the contents of the PartitionMagic floppies. It might work. I have also seen a recovery cd image somewhere on the net that had partition magic on it. However, that would be illegal to use since you'd be getting a pirated copy But since you own a copy of partition magic anyway... Decide for yourself, im not going to advertise illegal software here

[Raven_Writer]

Originally Posted by Greg

If you used Partition Magic, then this is (almost) certainly the problem you are having. Now to get into Partition Magic...

When you installed Partition Magic it asked you to make boot floppies. If you had those, you could boot into dos with a dos version of Partition Magic running. But i think you said you dont have a floppy drive. Try this. Have someone install Partition Magic and make the disks. Then burn a bootable cd with dos on it, and the contents of the PartitionMagic floppies. It might work. I have also seen a recovery cd image somewhere on the net that had partition magic on it. However, that would be illegal to use since you'd be getting a pirated copy But since you own a copy of partition magic anyway... Decide for yourself, im not going to advertise illegal software here

Hm...good idea. I'll install PM on this machine tomorrow (heading off to bed right now), and create the boot disks and such.

If anyone would like to guide me through this, just PM me *at this moment, I think it'd very advisable that someone do guide me through all this*

[Raven_Writer]

Well, it seems my computer took a turn for the worse...here's my new situation:

SuSE 9.1 Personal and Windows won't load anymore (it seems like I only have 1 partition, and I believe it's 2.03 Gigs). So, if anyone knows of a way to fix this, please tell me. Here's what I did that caused this:

Someone referenced me to SeaTools made by SeaGate (which is my hard drive manufacture'er (sp?). So, I ran that, and started the diagnostics testing until I had to quit when it first started. That caused my hard drive to not have a swap and linux partition anymore.

I was thinking of doing a ZeroWrite (aka ZeroFill), and just reinstall Windows 98 SE, what does anyone think of this idea??

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Raven_Writer

I was thinking of doing a ZeroWrite (aka ZeroFill), and just reinstall Windows 98 SE, what does anyone think of this idea??

Well, too bad you didnt trust me I am sure Partition Magic would have fixed this in under 5 minutes, because this is exactly what happened to me before.

You dont have to zero-fill in order to reinstall Windows. The garbage data on the disk will not be in FAT anyway and will just be treated as free space and get overwritten eventually. Just delete all partitions and create one FAT32 partition on the disk. You can do that by booting into DOS and running FDISK. I think the Win98 install CD has an option to boot into DOS.

Before you do this you may want to double-check the partitioning with Partition Magic just to make sure everything is dead How did you determine that you only have one partition on the disk? If you did this by running Partition Magic, this may be caused by overlapping partitions. In this case Partition Magic will show one partition marked as "corrupted". You can sometimes fix this by manually editing the partition table. However, because you said the system won't boot anymore, the data may be lost

[Raven_Writer]

Well, no need to fix my floppy drive, it is finally working excellent. Here's what I did:

1. Started fdisk, and checked the partitions
2. Deleted the 2 (which all there were) partitions
3. Created a primary DOS partition
4. Rebooted w/ startup disk in CD-ROM drive
5. Reformated drive

Thanks though much

*Thanks to Greg, Astro, and everyone else who helped me through this ordeal, it was much appreciated *