Microsoft Haters, One more reason...

[cgkanchi]

This is a reeeeallly long rant
Here's what happened.
I'm trying to install OpenBSD and so I create 4 partitions, 1 each for /, /usr, /home and swap. Alright until now. I install OpenBSD and then boot, thinking that, as there's no boot manager, the comp will automatically boot into WinXP. Well, it didn't. I got the good old

Non System Disk or Disk Error

So I said alright, I 'll just boot from a floppy and see what's wrong. So, I boot from the floppy and say, C: and it says

Invalid Drive specification

So I say fdisk and 4. And this is what the f***ing thing (sorry! I'm just so pissed off) shows me:

1 Non Dos 1024 MB
2 Non Dos 1024 MB
3 Non Dos 1024 MB
4 Non Dos 514 MB
I have a 20GB hard disk of which the remaining was a 10gb windows drive and a 5 gb extended drive with all of the space occupied by a logical drive.
Apparently, windows won't recognize more than 4 primary partitions on a single drive. So it decided that I had a 3.5GB hard disk all of which was occupied by 4 Non Dos partitions. The 5 GB partition (D: under windows) had all of the stuff that I had dowloaded in the past THREE years! I cry just thinking about it . I had some old DOS utilities that are impossible to get anymore. Plus I had 2 GB of songs on that. All because some ******* at M$ was just too lazy to add support for more that 4 primary partitions, him. I lost 4GB of data including some great ebooks that I had downloaded from the net, all my bookmarks, so I don't even know the sites where I got them anymore, and all the code that I'd written in the last 2 years. I even lost the finished C-Programming Tutorial Chapter 3.
And what makes it even worse is that I was going to rent a CD-R drive and back up everything tomorrow!
Begging for Sympathy, Not Flames,
cgkanchi.

[gold eagle]

snif. <offers shoulder, pats back> there there. We've all done something like that.

[iNViCTuS]

I don't think it is a Windows probem. I have freebsd running dual boot with the same partition format. /, /var, /usr, and swap. Windows works just fine. Are you sure that during the install, you did not accidentally erase the windows partition.

Besides, if you cannot see the partition from fdisk, it is not a Windows problem at all. What was the partition type of the partition originally, NTFS or FAT32?

[rcgreen]

Not a problem. If you can remember the partition size(s) of your
previous installation, boot from floppy, run fdisk and enter correct
partition sizes and presto! everything restored.
Don't remember previous sizes? Shame on you.
You may have to experiment with partition data
until you find the right settings. Don't give up!
If all your stuff is valuable to you, it pays to be patient.
Your stuff will reappear unless the unix install overwrote the data,
a possibility,now that I think of it.
By the way, the limit of four primary partitions is not the fault
of windows, or microsoft, it is the original design of
the PC hard drive protocol.
Anyway, now you have the chance to become
a data recovery specialist.

[cgkanchi]

Well, I didn't have the exact partition sizes (I know, shame on me). However, I could have played around and got the right mix, but I just didn't have the time. And I needed my computer up in a hurry(before my folks freaked out). So I just created new partitions and reinstalled windows XP. Poor me. Oh well, the next time I should just write everything down (and no, not in a text file )
cgkanchi.