Partition magic killed mY D!

[novkhan]

Goodday.

I have a harddisk that partitioned wif C Drive and D Drive.

I used Partition magic to merge C into D.

When my system reboot it shows " No bootable devices -strike F1 to retry
boot, F2 to setup utility."

More Info:
C Drive was Win XP
D Drive was 2000 Prof

I only wanted 2000 , so i merged C into D.

It is a Laptop with no Floppy DIsk "A" drive.
Niether i have external A Drive.

I guess the soultion is to make D active! But how do i do that?


Kind Urgent!
Thankyou

[rider_royal]

well oops if i'm thinking right then u merged C partion with D partition which was not active but did you modify MBR for that and how can you have in same parttion a bootable operating system after a empty space before as is case with your new partion.
Because of this thinking i think if you want your windows 2000 back you have to reinstall it but if you try you copy data on it to toher partition by connecting that HDD to other computer (if that partition is still accessible)
Hope this helps.
But guys do correct me if i'm wrong, thank you

[muert0]

If you "merge" C into D wouldn't that erase all data on both?
By the way is it a legal copy of partition magic. There are some "cracked" copies out there that don'tdo what partition magic is supposed to do they really just erase your HDDs.

[nihil]

On bootup if you take the F2 option it will take you into BIOS setup.

1. Does it recognise that you have a hard drive? try running autodetect.
2. What is the boot sequence? it should be CD then HDD

It sounds lke your master boot record is corrupt, so you will probably have to boot from your Windows CD and reinstall.

Good luck

[muert0]

Nooooooo. Heh. If he didn't ruin both setups by merging and it is just his MBR shouldn't he put the winXP disk in and go to recovery console and type /fixmbr. I'm going to post this now so he doesn't reinstall then go and look up the command for sure.

EDIT: It's fixmbr without the /. Sorry if I'm wrong I just don't want him to go through a reinstall if that's all he really needs to do.

[hypronix]

First question is: did you use Partition Magic for XP [version 8, I think] if you used it from XP? Otherwise PM isn't fully adapted for that OS.

Normally it wouldn't delete the HDDs, but copy all content of one partition into a folder on the resulting one. As for the MBR, I think the program would take care of that... but it seems it didn't. Even if it isn't a pirate copy... PM once deleted all my extended partitions [which, coincidentally, had Slackware, swap and /home on them] So I think the program might be buggy on certain tasks. I tried [back in my Win days] to avoid using it too much after it killed some of my partitions.

[nihil]

Muert0,

I can see what you are getting at, but he seems to want to create a Windows 2000 machine, not an XP one?

Given that something strange has obviously happened, the simplest and most reliable recovery method might be to reformat and reinstall Windows2000. That will get him booting it from "C"

From what he has said it sounds as if he has lost his "C" partition, I don't think windows will like that?

just a thought

[Und3ertak3r]

He also lost a couple of needed files for Win2k .. NTLDR being one of them..

Cheers

[muert0]

I ran my xp machine off the F:/ partition and I've heard a lot of people say windows only likes to run on C;/ but I never had a problem with it. And I was just thinkin he might wanna fix the MBR to get back into windows to backup his data before he went on to install 2000.

[CybertecOne]

i believe whats happened is (without much knowledge or experience) youve gone ahead a done something which you THOUGHT would give certain results and it didnt.

your merged the partitions, possibily corrupting both, and also detroyed the Master Boot Record.

i dont have much experience with 2k, but if its got the repair option from boot cd like winxp does, you could go into the recovery console, and type, "Fix MBR" enter and then "Fix Boot" and it should make the partition bootable. however it still could be corrupt and non-functional. but a re-install of the OS should be able to make things managable for someone as adventurous to mess with partitions (without proper know-how)

hope that helped. GL.

CTO