Missing Partition

fatherdougal · 29 Oct 2007 at 21:27

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

fatherdougal · 29 Oct 2007 at 22:12

RaiderX said:
have you tried an xp installer? that might see it as it was originally an xp partition

No I haven't. I've been running Vista on it for a few weeks now and I think that all traces of XP are gone. Trying to download something to find my partition table under DOS at the moment.

fatherdougal · 29 Oct 2007 at 22:57

well i've found it. I just can't get the thing to boot now. Command error at startup.
All of this for a lousy couple of Gigs of space.

fatherdougal · 30 Oct 2007 at 10:50

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?

fatherdougal · 30 Oct 2007 at 11:41

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?

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?

fatherdougal · 30 Oct 2007 at 14:10

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

fatherdougal · 30 Oct 2007 at 17:01

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.