Help, people

Can't get my system to boot as a result, I think, of messing with the active
partition. How can I reset it?

I have been trying to expand my 4GB boot partition and bought Partition
Manager (from Paragon) for this purpose. Had a bit of trouble installing the
product (caused, allegedly by InstallShield) and this morning tried to run
the partition resizing utility. At this point I was just shrinking the D:
partitiion to release space for expanding C. On the required reboot,
Partition Manager went into 'blue screen' mode but stalled at 99% of a disk
checking routine. I disappeared up the other end of the office for 10
minutes to check the on-line manual and got back to see a regular Win 2K
start up screen but one reporting insufficient paging file size plus a load
of other error messages. When it finished, I discovered I had no D: drive.

I ran disk manager in Windows (disks are all NTFS) and saw that the disk was
reported as good but it had no drive letter. I set it to D: and rebooted.
Trouble is, I also marked the partition as active (though not, AFAICR,
bootable). Not sure why I did this but, anyway, when the system came back
up, it didn't.

I have booted up from the SBS2K install disks and run Recovery Console.
Diskpart tells me that I have:

Drive C: (which looks like the previously missing logical drive D: in the
extended partition),
Drive E: (which seems to be the old drive C;
Drive D: (a small Fat32 partition containing Dell utilities);
Drive G (separate dynamic disk).

However, all it will let me do with these is delete them - which is
definitely not what I want.

What I do want is to be able to change the active partition back to the old
Drive C: but I cannot figure out how to do this. In the good old Fat32/Win9x
days, I would have run Fdisk from a floppy boot disk and switched the active
partition. I don't think I can use Fdisk off an old Win98 disk without
breaking NTFS. As I can't get W2K up, I can't run the disk manager to
reverse my initial mistake. I am reluctant to use either of the bootfix or
MBRfix utilities in the Recovery Consule as I have no idea what they
actually do (and I am discouraged by the 'press this and die!' warning
messages you get when you select them). I think what i need is a boot
manager utility which will run from a floppy and will let me switch the
active partition back to the one that actually has the boot sector and MBR
on it. Ironically, I've got one - from Paragon (remember them? They broke my
system in the first place!) - but I hadn't got around to creating the floppy
disk and the software is on the Drive G which I can't get at.

So your clever people out there:

* am I guessing right that I have broken my system by changing the active
partition to a non-bootable one;
* is there anything which ships with SBS which might fix it - and
doesn't require Windows to be actually working first;
* or can someone point me to a downloadable utility (preferably free or
share ware) which might help me out of my predicament.

I'd be very grateful. This is a workgroup server supporting 12 users - all
of whom are going to find life very difficult on Monday if I can't fix this
tomorrow. I've x-posted to a couple of Windows 2000 groups as this is
probably not an SBS-specific problem.

Thanks for listening.

Paul

To resolve this problem, perform one of the following:

If the partition that has been incorrectly marked as active is a FAT
FAT32, or NTFS partition, you may be able to correct the problem b
using the Windows Recovery Console command Fixboot(Writes a new boo
sector onto the system partition)


For additional information, to view the article in the Microsof
Knowledge Base:

Q228004 at:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=228004

Recovery Console Command
http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBG/TIP3200/rh3201.htm

or

If you need to access NTFS drives from MS-DOS, NTFSDOS Professional 5.
is the solution. NTFSDOS Professional allows you to create a boo
diskette with which to boot NT systems. The diskette contains an MS-DO
environment where you can easily mount NTFS drives with drive letter
and run DOS programs to read, write, repair or otherwise modify th
drives just as you would on FAT drives

PC_Wi
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