we hates the gateses, my preciousss...

[bigdamnnerd]

So I have 5 Gb of unformatted space on the same hard drive as my C: drive (30 gb drive) which was going to be a Linux partition. But, I have a dedicated Linux box now, so there's no need to dual boot my Windows box.

So I fire up the Drive Manager, and format that 5Gb into a new drive.

One reboot later (unrelated), and "Error loading operating system".

I poke about the interweb on my laptop, and I guess that the MBR got fux0red, but good.

Two or three attempts with the Win2k recovery console (and fixmbr and fixboot) do absolutely nothing. It seems that the 25gb former boot partition is now the F: drive, and the new 5gb drive has claimed C: status. That explains why it couldn't find a OS on the blank (damaged?) 5gb partition).

So, once again, I'm re-installing Windows. On the 5gb partition, so I don't lose anything. And, foolishly, I still have hope that I'll be able to pull off some sort of drive-letter shell game, and reset things to the way they were before.

This is why I do all my real work on OSX and Linux....grrr...

Comments

[beez23.livejournal.com]

Similarly, my boot disk is recognized by Win2K as the G:. I have no idea how the hell this happened as it's the master on the primary and was completely fresh out of the box on install. I had 2K installed on the primary slave, guess I'll have to remember to disconnect all drives except the boot drive when installing 2K next time :P.

[hagbard23.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've had that happen too--my boot disk was also G: for a while.

What was frustrating about this was the way that the new partition stole the C: name (as far as I can tell, simply by being formatted) and made the original boot disk into the F:. I didn't start the windows reinstall until I had figured that much out at least.

fix0r

[destructiva.livejournal.com]

partition magic will fix problems like these. i managed to save my hard drives many a time from windows/linux/shittyproblems many a time. ;D