Inactive Partition

[Jelyrol]

Hi,
I have a friend who was using Partition Magic to create another partition in his HD so that he could have a duel boot system with XP/Linux. He ran the partition magic and at the end he had a message saying he will need to reboot the machine then install the other operating system. When he tried to reboot he just kept getting drive read errors. He rebooted the system again with the XP cd and besides the C drive it said inactive and he was not able to change it. He ran Fix MBR and then he rebooted he said he had some error about Missing NTLDR.

Well at the end he finally just formated the HD and re-installed windows. So what im asking is, was there anything he could have done to re-activate his C drive?

Thanks
Jelyrol

 

[djnes]

Without knowing exactly what he did, it's tough to say, but most likely, yes. He could have deleted the second partition, and then booted to his recovery console, running fixboot on C:.

What he did wrong was to create a partition for Linux. I'm not sure where he got this idea, but it's what caused all kinds of problems. If he wants to dual boot Linux with XP....have him install XP, and leave blank space for Linux...meaning unformatted. Then boot from the Linux CD, and choose the option to use the free (empty space).

 

[Jelyrol]

Thanks for the reply,
I was thinking the same thing about not knowing what he actually did, but he did run Fixboot and that did not solve the issue either.

Thanks