Partition Magic problems

My sis and I were running windows XP and linux redhat 7.0 (dual boot) on a 900Mhz, 20 Gb machine.
Since I wanted to change to suse, I told my sister to uninstall redhat . what does she do- she goes to Partition magic, deletes the Linux partition and frees the unallocated memory to the windows partition. She also converts the XP partition (that was holding XP), into a primary partition. she left the boot section and the windows partition. Restart.
The lilo prompt is there. Of course trying to boot into linux generates an error. What foxes me is why I cannot access load windows. I suspect the conversion into primary partition but I need help on how to correct this. If possible.
thanks in advance.
(I have read most of the past posts and couldn't come up with much on this subject).

P.S. There was a warning that the xp partition conversion can make the partition unbootable.

The only suggestion that comes to mind is booting with a dos disk and doing an fdisk /mbr. It was an old trick from NT/2000 days when the LILO still remained.

Otherwise, I unfortunately am not versed enough in XP to offer advice beyond that. =(

thanx MsMittens 'will try that for the time being

its actually
fixboot c:
and
fixmbr in win xp :)
rioter

small drives...

you could also manually change the partition tables in the MBR which is located at : Cyl 0, Side 0, Sector 1 of the disk(use MS's DiskProbe to read this). the first 446 BYTES are the MBR itself, which consists of executable code which is loaded and, amazingly, executed. the partition table is a 64 BYTE data structure, hence can take FOUR 16 BYTE entries, following the MBR. Below is a sample Partition Table, in hexidecimal, of course. at offset 0x1BE you will see the start of the entry for the first partition, marked here with 0x80 this means that this partition is active, and when booting, this partition will be checked for an OS. the second partition in the above table is inactive, because at offset 0x1CE (or the second pair of digits from the right in the second row) there is the value 0x00. this table has only two partitions in it. the last two BYTES are a signature WORD for the sector and are always 0x55AA. the FIXMBR command which comes with the Recovery Console will repair damage to this by locating what logical drive you have installed Win2k/xp on, and making the changes to the table as required. typically you will get an "Operating system not found" error if there is something amiss with the partition tables, like its trying to boot from a partition that hasn't got an OS, or the end signature is missing or a virus has replaced a table entry with 0's.

Offset
--------------¬
0000001B0 xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx 80 00
0000001C0 42 4B 02 FE 7F 62 7E 32 4E 00 A6 52 09 00 00 00
0000001D0 43 25 0E FE BF 4A 2F 83 57 00 B6 62 31 00 00 00
0000001E0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000001F0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 AA


the FIXBOOT command will fix the partition boot sector, which is the first sector in a partition. the MBR uses the boot sector of a partition to load the OS's kernel. also the file system uses the information held in the PBS to access the volume. the NTFS PBS is stored at the middle or end of the NTFS volume. so if your PBS is ok for your ntfs volume, then you shouldn't use the FIXBOOT command, that is, unless you aren't getting an "Non System Disk or Disk Error" error message, the PBS ain't broken.

but here's "the thing"...
Large drives do not have the standard loader code that FDISK /MBR and FIXMBR put there. instead they have drive overlay software, such as OnTrack Disk Manager, whose code will be DESTROYED when you execute one of the above commands, and of course, your drive will not be accessable. the partition tables are also stored differently on drives with disk overlay software, but can be manipulated just as easily, manually.

i hope you haven't got one of those drives,
hand

Why: bad alignment made the ascii look really confusing, no ascii anymore...

(V)/\>< : why I am sure your correct, but I didnt understand a damn thing you wrote. lol

heres what I would try thats pretty simple

change the boot order to cd rom in bios

put your windows disk in and get into windows. when in windows, play with PM. if that doesnt work, atleast you can backup all your stuff if you have to format the hard disk.

In a normal (windows only} installation, windows will be installed in a
primary partition, and the partition must be flagged active (bootable)
If the computer was set up as dual boot, it is possible that the windows
partition was not flagged as active, since LILO doesn't depend on
the active flag to find the OS, but can boot which ever partition you
select at boot time.

If you can boot to a DOS prompt and run FDISK, you can check if the
windows partition is active, and if not, make it active. You should
be able to do this from a win 98 boot floppy. I don't know if the
windows install CD will do it without insisting on doing a reinstall.

If you have the latest Norton Utilities, you can boot from the NU CD
and probably do manual editing of the master boot record (if you
knew what to look for)
:cool: