Hard drive partition problem

[Thomas Waugh]

Help ive been really stupid!

I was trying to create some space on the drive, and i used partition magic
to delete a partition i didnt recognize. It was only a small (7-8 MB)
partition and im fairly sure that ity ws set to active. I am also sure that
there was more than one active partition on this disk, but everything that i
have read tells me that this cant be true. Now whe i boot my computer up it
trys to boot IDE-0 the drive but fails and comes up with the error message
"Cannot find NTLDR"
Can anyone help?
What have i done and how can i undo it as i have data that i'd rather not
lose?


My specifications

Win XP pro
AMD 1400 processor
256MB ram
80 Gb hard drive
GForce 3 128mb

 

[WinXP]

Hi,

First thing to do is check the floppy drive to make sure
that you didn't inadvertently left a floppy disk in there
that's not a boot disk. Now, if that was the case,
removing the floppy and restart should boot your computer
up okay. If that's not the case, then go into setup Bios
and switch to boot up with CDRom and perform a repair with
the WinXP CD. Good luck.

Sleepless

 

[Alex Nichol]

I was trying to create some space on the drive, and i used partition magic
to delete a partition i didnt recognize. It was only a small (7-8 MB)
partition and im fairly sure that ity ws set to active. I am also sure that
there was more than one active partition on this disk, but everything that i
have read tells me that this cant be true. Now whe i boot my computer up it
trys to boot IDE-0 the drive but fails and comes up with the error message
"Cannot find NTLDR"
Can anyone help?
What have i done and how can i undo it as i have data that i'd rather not
lose?

There is only ever one partition that is active. IT sounds to me as if
you may have had a boot manager in the micro partition. But things
should be repairable:

Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead
of Setup, take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password
requested is blank, and TAB over.

Use the commands
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot
FixMBR

Then reboot, in the same way, have the CD in the drive - and presuming
that usually has letter D: give
COPY D:\i386\ntldr C:\ntldr