Okay. I'm trying to fix a friend's laptop. it had 2 OS installs on it - one
Red Hat Fedora on 8GB, and one XP on 10GB, and was booting with the Grub boot
loader. XP was completely unusable, it was so screwed up with malware.
I booted to an XP Pro CD, and formatted the foreign disk (the Redhat install
partition) and put a fresh install there. I loaded up some antivirus
software, spybot, and some other utilities, and started to import data from
her old XP install. In particular, I know she was eager to recover all of her
digital photography. Anyway, after some time, I have copied over all relevant
data, and my new install remained uncompromised by the nasty virusses and
malware that infested the original installation.
So, I went into Disk Management, and I deleted the C: Partition (my install
was showing up as D:\Windows), set the D: partition as active, and I kept in
my back of my mind the fact that I would need to modify the boot.ini to
reflect the change. Before I did that, however, I decided to convert the disk
to Dynamic so that I could span the now unformatted space where her old
install resided.
The idea was that I'd avoid doing another install and copying the recovered
data back again.
Well, I got a message about unmounting the file system, and rebooting, but I
don't think it gave me the option to NOT proceed at that point. It said that
it would complete the disk conversion after the reboot. Of course, because I
hadn't yet modified the Boot.ini, this didn't happen... it couldn't boot.
I tried to use the XP CD to repair... and without really thinking about what
I was doing, I went into recovery mode and used the fixmbr command... I had
no idea how bad that would be.
Anyway, I've since reloaded XP Pro to the space inhabitted originally by my
friend's BAD install. In Disk Management, I see the whole disk as Dynamic
Unreadable, and don't even see the partition I am booting in to. The only
option I'm given here is to Convert to Basic Disk, which will delete the data
I'm still intent on recovering.
I've been reading KB articles, and I don't quite understand what I need to
do to resolve this. The disk never finished converting to Dynamic, so does
this mean that I need to edit the boot sector to remove the 0x42 entry that
I'll find when I run dmdiag -v? Or will need I need to modify whatever is
there to be 0x42? The articles I've read attempt to explain the situation I
guess, but I'm not understanding it. I don't feel confident making any change
that low level without some confirmation.
Anyone around that knows a lot about this sort of thing that can give me
some insight? It would be greatly appreciated!!!
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