Plz Help :_(

[TheeeGod 3]

hello :(

i was trying to reinstall win xp from a cd i dled and it messed up somehow. to make things even worse, i deleted my main partition of 40+ gigs. i now have a 7mb partition and cannot do anything. i have a HP and cannot run system restore because the prog runs out of space and says cannot recover. im really frustrated and have no clue what to do. the system doesn't even start. it just says "not system disk...remove and press any key" the starnge thing is there is nothing in any of the drives.

WHAT CAN I DO? plz help

is there any way to restore the partition? or anything else? :(

[Awatef]

get a win98 CD and boot from it, then select DOS with CD support and run:

format c:

from the CD

[Koepi]

fdisk

would be way more appropiate in his case.

I recommand fetching a linsuxx ;) Transcode etc aren't too easy to cope with, but... no such problems there.

Regards,
koepi

[ppera2]

Perhaps it can be restored, or some files saved. But you need expert for it....

[Trahald]

partition magic is the best.. it would expand the partition back to 40 preserving the data

you need to make recovery partition magic floppy disks from a functioning pc (the one you posted from perhaps?) and make sure its the newest version of partition magic if you have a ntfs partition (go buy it.. its an excellent program and worth the $$)

[karloz1]

Have you tried putting the HD into another computer as a secondary drive? You might have drive overlay software on the HD. Try holding CTRL down when you first boot the computer, on the screen where it detects the drives. If you do have drive overlay it will bring up a program, Ez-Bios is a common one. It will then ask for a boot disk. Put in a win98 boot disk and run Fdisk. Hope this helps.

[markrb]

Becuase you tried to write to the disc I doubt you will save the data on the drive using Partition Magic.

In your case I recomemnd creating a Win98 Boot disc with the following programs on it.

Fdisk
Format
Himem
SmartDrive

Run Fdisk, make sure you have it pointing to the correct drive, remove the partion(s), create a partition, make it active, format the drive with the /s switch.

Copy the entire WinXP cd into a directory not named Windows.

Create the Config.sys and autoexec.bat with himem and SmartDrive in the appropriate one.

Install XP using the Winnt.exe in the I386 directory off the HD.

Mark

[evilhomer]

that's what partition magic does. it's $45 (u.s.) but its worth it to me, because it saves your data. of course if you look around you could.......

[Arky]

Let me know how you get on.

As attested to by the above replies, there is always more than one way to skin a rabbit.

Be aware that the DOS version of Partition Magic has a very nasty habit of automatically "locking" the HDD against boot sector writes WITHOUT telling you!! The upshot of this (and I've learnt this by ~H~A~R~D~ experience) is that Ghost or Drive Image (usually all-in-one recovery disks such as those provided by Advent and H.P., for example, make use of Ghost) will attempt to restore/recover your system from the image on the recovery CD, only to fail at about 97%. Just thought I'd mention this "little" detail, since it's frustrated me for DAYs in the past, even though I knew what I was doing.


Arky ;o)