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Guest
OK my machine has 2 hard drives, 1 IDE and 1 SATA. I moved the XP home
install to the new SATA about 4 months ago and have had no problems. The old
drive (now my secondary) was reformatted. Recently it was getting sluggish,
however and I wanted to clean out a lot of old junk, so I decided to
reinstall XP (on the new SATA). When I boot to the install CD, before the
install starts, I get a message that there is not enough free space on the
drive to install. No problem, I figure. So I exit out of the install, but
when I try to reboot, the BIOS recognizes the drive but XP won't boot. So I
run the install on the secondary drive no problem, but when I pull up the
SATA drive in explorer it says it is not formatted(!?!) Now when I try to run
the XP install on the SATA drive it says half the drive is partitioned and
half is unpartitioned. Previously there was only 1 partition containing the
whole drive. So I figure the master boot record has been corrupted, so I
enter the repair console and try "fixmbr" which gives me a message
resembling:
"an invalid or nonstandard partition table signature is detected, you will
be prompted whether you want to continue. If you are not having problems
accessing your drives, you should not continue. Writing a new master boot
record to your system partition could damage your partition tables and cause
your partitions to become inaccessible."
My question is will this "damage my partition tables and cause my partitions
to become inaccessible"??? Is there a better way to fix this? Would "fixboot"
work? I REALLY need to get the data off the drive and don't want to re-format
or re-partition!!! Help!
install to the new SATA about 4 months ago and have had no problems. The old
drive (now my secondary) was reformatted. Recently it was getting sluggish,
however and I wanted to clean out a lot of old junk, so I decided to
reinstall XP (on the new SATA). When I boot to the install CD, before the
install starts, I get a message that there is not enough free space on the
drive to install. No problem, I figure. So I exit out of the install, but
when I try to reboot, the BIOS recognizes the drive but XP won't boot. So I
run the install on the secondary drive no problem, but when I pull up the
SATA drive in explorer it says it is not formatted(!?!) Now when I try to run
the XP install on the SATA drive it says half the drive is partitioned and
half is unpartitioned. Previously there was only 1 partition containing the
whole drive. So I figure the master boot record has been corrupted, so I
enter the repair console and try "fixmbr" which gives me a message
resembling:
"an invalid or nonstandard partition table signature is detected, you will
be prompted whether you want to continue. If you are not having problems
accessing your drives, you should not continue. Writing a new master boot
record to your system partition could damage your partition tables and cause
your partitions to become inaccessible."
My question is will this "damage my partition tables and cause my partitions
to become inaccessible"??? Is there a better way to fix this? Would "fixboot"
work? I REALLY need to get the data off the drive and don't want to re-format
or re-partition!!! Help!