Missing Partition

fatherdougal

fatherdougal

fatherdougal

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Joined
24 Jun 2007
Posts
320
Hi all,

I'm in real trouble. I decided today that as I had removed XP and put vista on to my Samsung laptop I would remove the 3.5gb recovery partition. I did this but now this appears as the only partition on my 100gb hardrive.
I've tried going into vista setup but all that it can see is the tiny partition that used to have the recovery area on it.:confused:

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance
 
Right I've managed to find the O/S partition and merged the small partition into it. However the system still fails to boot. I've made sure that the settings are right in the bios and I've tried repairing from my windows install disks and it finds problems and tells me that it has fixed them but still won't boot.

Any one got any ideas?
 
(off the top of my head)

Have a muck about in the recovery console (boot with Windows XP CD, go into recovery console.)

Verify that you can actually see your windows partition on drive c: (using commands "cd", "dir" etc)

If you can, try running "fixmbr" and "fixboot" on it to rewrite the master boot record and partition boot sector.

How did you merge the other partition? Delete it and then resize the OS partition? Using what?
 
ByteJuggler said:
(off the top of my head)

Have a muck about in the recovery console (boot with Windows XP CD, go into recovery console.)

Verify that you can actually see your windows partition on drive c: (using commands "cd", "dir" etc)

If you can, try running "fixmbr" and "fixboot" on it to rewrite the master boot record and partition boot sector.

How did you merge the other partition? Delete it and then resize the OS partition? Using what?
Click to expand...

Hi, I used GPARTED, booting from a systemrescuecd that I burnt on my desktop. To start off with I just set the O/S partition as the 'boot' option from here and got it recognised by windows. I then tried merging the partitions to see if that would 'simplify' matters.
Now that I can see the partition again, to re-format, and start again, I'm not too worried. I would like to try and recover the data but nothing vital will disappear if I can't.

Would re-partitioning and installing Vista again, on say 10gb, allow me to use the data on the old partition? and after removing it re-format?
 
OK, well your disk is probalby fixable one way or another, but it's a tad hard to diagnose over the forum, so you might end up having to save the data and reinstall at the end of the day... :-S You can bootup with one of the rescue cd's again, most these days can start a Samba server so you can then share your drive contents from the booted liveCD and copy the stuff onto another PC, or if you've got another drive attached you can obviously copy it onto that. One of the better recovery cd's is TRK, or you could try booting with (e.g.) an Ubuntu LiveCD which should (fingers crossed) boot you into a full GUI desktop from which you can share/mount other windows machines and copy etc. your files.

Your suggestion might also work yes, create a temporary 16GB (10GB is too small for Vista to install in, but 16GB can work) installation and work from there.
 
Might go down the linux route anyway as I fancy having a little bit of a play around.
I'll try to get the boot order working first and if I can't do that then install Ubuntu and start to recover anything that I think that I need.

Thanks for taking the time to try and help me
 
OK.

Now I'm confused. I created a new partition to install Ubuntu on, I had been fiddling around in diskpart for a while first trying to set my partition as the boot one. That hadn't worked so I went and made the new partition and re-booted...
And it went straight into windows.
How odd.
 
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