I need some help.

packardmelan

New member
I was messing around with some partitions on my spare hard drive tonight, and screwing around with Linux and Windows XP and stuff. What I ended up doing was creating a 2 GB partition with ext3, and a 76 GB partition with hfs+ or whatever.

I followed a wiki that was telling me how to change the active partition from the first (2gb partition) to the second (the 76gb partition), using Windows XP and the diskpart program. Windows seemed happy with the outcome and I shut down the PC.

On boot, it locks up. I can't get to my BIOS setup, I can't boot to XP, I can't boot to Linux, I can't boot off CD. Maybe I could try to boot off USB, but if the BIOS won't, I doubt USB would either. If I unhook the hard drive I swapped the active partition on, everything boots up fine. But if I hook it back up, it locks up.

Please tell me that setting up a PARTITION didn't fry the hard drive... What do I do? I'm SOL, aren't I?
 
Did you possibly dismount or make your drives not active when you did this??

Did you put the bios on the 2gb partition accidentally? You may want to try to put in you Linux install disk and try to boot with that or fix the partition and boot sector. It sounds like the boot sector to me. <img src=smilies/cwm11.gif>
 
> Please tell me that setting up a PARTITION didn't fry the
> hard drive... What do I do? I'm SOL, aren't I?

Put the XP disc in and go into the recovery console (hit R).

Once there type 'fixmbr' and then 'exit'. That should fix the broken master boot record.
 
It's not just the boot record. I mean, I can't get to my BIOS setup screen if the hard drive is plugged in. I've gotten *some* action, off trying to let it boot, but now it comes up with an error saying there's no hard drive installed.

I'm going to try taking it out and making it the master and booting up with it and a cd drive... I hope that works.
 
Try unplugging your computer and taking your battery out of the motherboard, this will clear the bios. You may have a corrupted bios that's locking up everything in an endless loop just like a bad CD will lock up your CD drive. <img src=smilies/cwm11.gif>
 
> Is the cable plugged in the correct direction?
>
possible. Might have accidentally crimped it one to many times and damaged the cable. Happened to me recently and I got that same message of the drive not being installed on ide0, but my D drive on ide1 was working fine. I bet your absolutely right. I bet it is the cable. <img src=smilies/werd.gif>
 
The cannot clear the bios. You can move the cmos reset jumper, apply power, move it back, and then boot up.
 
It's not that. Believe me. :)

I got it to work, somewhat, but it's acting VERY oddly. I have to hot swap the IDE cable to get it to boot from the CD drive, and then I can load Linux. FDISK is reporting that the hard drive (a Seagate 80GB drive) as /dev/hba1 and /dev/hba2 (or whatever it is. so it's detecting properly.)

Now, the original partition, the 2gb partition, was bootable. The next partition is what I flagged 'active' and 'bootable'. I'm thinking the HD detection in the startup is getting trapped on two partitions that were probably written active and bootable, which is probably confusing the hell out of it...

I'm not sure how to fix this yet. But, the disk itself is okay and healthy as I can prove because I'm running live on it right now. :) I just have to figure out how to clear out the partition table and start over.
 
I'ld just format it again and make it one partition or if you use multiple ones then make the first one the active bootable one. <img src=smilies/cwm11.gif>
 
Yeah, the whole getting to the partition tool is what was throwing me off. I HATE hotswapping an IDE drive because of the risk involved, but... it worked. I got in, I repartitioned the drive, formatted, installed the OS, and while I was gone it SEEMS to have booted fine on its own.

I'm scared to shut down and reboot. *L* I'll HAVE to, here in a bit.

But, yay! At least for now, it's working!
 
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