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Partitions Missing...but a little different.

V

VGplay

Gawd
Joined
Jun 12, 2006
Messages
1,009
First, let me describe my partition setup. I have a 200gb PATA hard drive, and a 120gb PATA hard drive. On my 200gb I had two partitions, a 112gb with XP installed, and a 79gb wist Vista Beta 2. Then my 120gb hard drive was one large partition with the Windows install and all my files from before I got the 200gb hard drive.

I rebuilt my computer today with a new motherboard, new video card, and an extra gig of RAM. Knowing Windows would have problems with the new motherboard I ran Sysprep last night before I went to bed. First time I goofed and clicked Factory. But I instantly turned my computer back on after that and it came back fine, just missing some drivers. So I ran it again, but followed the guide I saw here. The two checkboxes were blanked-out (Mini-Setup and PnP_ so I just clicked Reseal. Today I put everything together and booted up my computer. It went through the same "Please wait while Windows prepares to start....." screen but when it was ready to actually go into Windows, a BSoD flashed and my computer rebooted. Tried again, same thing. I think this is the same BSoD I've been having for a while now, so I decided to start fresh.

I did have some things on my XP partition I wanted to save, so I used QTParted on my MEPIS Linux CD to resize that partition to slightly more than what it was using, and I did the same with my Vista partition (since I also tried booting into Vista, and I got a BSoD. Plus there were also a few things I wanted to keep). Then with the new unpartitioned space, made a new partition to install a fresh copy of Windows to. I should say that on my first try with QTParted, it got an error and crashed. But when I tried again, it still saw both of my partitions.

So I did what I wanted with QTParted and rebooted into my XP install disk. When I got to where you pick what partition to install Windows to, there was only two partitoins. One was a 130gb partition and another was 112gb (my 2nd hard drive). I'm guessing the 130gb partition is my main hard drive, and the 130gb is the unpartitioned space, with all my data on the missing space. I didn't continue to install Windows, and went back to QTParted. It won't read the hard drive. Reads my 2nd drive fine, just not my first. MEPIS itself can't read my drive, either.

I did look around here and on Google, but can't find a solution to my specific scenario. I did try going into my XP CD's Recovery Console to try "fixmbr" and "fixboot", but it asks for an administrator password. I never set an administrator password for my computer, and my normal account password doesn't work. Is there a default admin password I'm not aware about?

I can't set my other hard drive as the master and boot from it because I'm on different hardware than the last time I used it, and then that WIndows would freak out. It would also be too much trouble to put together my old hardware to be able to boot and run any Windows-based recovery programs.

I don't have a credit card (or money for that matter) so paid programs are of no use to me. Is there anything I can run from my MEPIS ramdrive? Or what are my options be to try and recover my missing partitions? I wouldn't consider a total reformat an option because I have too much stuff I want on what I could possibly write over.

Any ideas? Thank you very much.
 
What commands should I use to get to what they're doing in that tutorial? In the console I type "command ntfsinfo" and it brings up a list of options, but none of them seem to be for what the tutorial is doing. Pardon for my lack-of knowledge, I don't normally use Linux.
 
You're looking for the number of blocks in the output of that command. You'll use that to determine if you have the correct size for the partition. Use this command:

Code: 
ntfsinfo -md /dev/partition

and look for the number of clusters and cluster size. You should be able to figure out the partition size, and use that to rebuild each partition in turn.
 
One more thing - make sure you set the partition types to NTFS before trying to boot Windows or mount it in Linux. NTFS is type 7. The ntfsinfo command won't care what the partition type is, but Windows will.
 
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