restore Windows partition to C: again and be able to boot?

[lm]

I have been doing some updates on my wife's Dell Inspiron 700m laptop. Note
that a long time ago I upgraded the hard drive so it is not the original Dell
hard drive. I did notice that there is an additional unmounted partition of
about 3.5 GB at the end.

I wanted to see if the auto-recovery partition was on the hard drive so when
I booted up, I hit CTRL-F11, which I expected to either do nothing or take me
to a menu asking me if I wanted to restore to the factory install.

Well, instead it gave me some message about the PBR and then hung.
Now when I reboot that is all I can get.

So I booted into the Windows XP recovery console and I am able to get into
Windows there, but now instead of the C: drive like it always was, it is the
D: drive! And the C: drive is that 3.5GB partition.

What I would like to do is get the Windows partition to be the C: drive
again and be able to boot back into Windows XP (Pro SP3) just as I was able
to before I hit F11.

I tried using FIXBOOT and that did not work. DISKPART just shows both
partitions and I could delete them but I do NOT want to lose the data on the
main partition. FIXMBR also wanrs me I might lose the partition so I have not
tried it.

Note after FIXBOOT I now get a message about missing NTLDR, but I think it
is still trying to boot from the 3.5GB partition and not the Windows
partition.

BOOTCFG does a scan and then tells me to run CHKDSK. Maybe it doesn't like
the 3.5GB partition.

Any ideas?

 

[TVeblen]

I've not done this, but why couldn't you go to the XP destop from recovery
console, then into Administrative Tools > Disk Management and change the
3.5GB partition to E: , then the XP Partition back to C: from there?

 

[lm]

Because I cannot boot into Windows. The Recovery console is a very limited
Command Line utility that you can boot to from the Windows CD. But thanks for
the idea anyway...

 

[TVeblen]

Sorry. You stated "and I am able to get into Windows there," and I
misunderstood.

 

[Gerry]

Do you have data files you need to recover? You need to do this before
trying to fix the boot problem!

Do you have second computer? Is it a Desktop or a Laptop? What is the
make and model?


--


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[David]

I've not done this, but why couldn't you go to the XP destop from recovery
console, then into Administrative Tools > Disk Management and change the
3.5GB partition to E: , then the XP Partition back to C: from there?

It seems as if both partitions are primary partitions and the small
one has been set as active. You need to run FDISK and set the larger
partition as the active partition.

 

[Richard]

I have been doing some updates on my wife's Dell Inspiron 700m laptop.
Note
that a long time ago I upgraded the hard drive so it is not the original
Dell
hard drive. I did notice that there is an additional unmounted partition
of
about 3.5 GB at the end.

I wanted to see if the auto-recovery partition was on the hard drive so
when
I booted up, I hit CTRL-F11, which I expected to either do nothing or take
me
to a menu asking me if I wanted to restore to the factory install.

Well, instead it gave me some message about the PBR and then hung.
Now when I reboot that is all I can get.

So I booted into the Windows XP recovery console and I am able to get into
Windows there, but now instead of the C: drive like it always was, it is
the
D: drive! And the C: drive is that 3.5GB partition.

What I would like to do is get the Windows partition to be the C: drive
again and be able to boot back into Windows XP (Pro SP3) just as I was
able
to before I hit F11.

The text near the top of the message says you hit "CTRL-F11", not "F11".
Have you tried booting up and hitting ctrl-F11 again, to see if maybe that
would toggle things back the way they were?

That's all I can think of. --Richard