Unable to access hard drive after deleting logical partition

[Mark Love]

I am running Win 2000 and had my 12GB hard drive
partitioned into two logical drives (C: & D and was
booting off the C: drive.

After installing a new 120GB hard drive successfully I
attempted to clean up my old hard drive by deleting the
logical partition responsible for my D: drive (using Win
2000 Disk Manager.

Unfortunaltey I am now unable to reboot my computer at
all, and I get the message "NTLDR is missing". I have
tried to reboot using a rescue disk and trying "sys c:" at
the DOS prompt(as recommended by Microsoft) but the
problem seems to be that the c: drive isn't recognised at
all.

Is there a way of re-enabling access to my C: drive
without having to re-format it?

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Mark

See if this MS Knowledge Base article can help you:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=318728

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[Mark Love]

Thanks Bjorn,

I will give it a try, but unfortunately I don't think it
will work as the suggested fix depends upon me being to
access C: which is unreadable.

However, the article did contain a link to an alternative
problem/fix which I think will help - so thanks for your
help in pointing me in the right direction.

"Changing Active Partition Can Make Your System Unbootable"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-
US;228004

Regards,
Mark.

 

[Dave]

Hi there,

you may need to edit the Boot.ini file on the rescue disk
to reflect the new disk you added, also make sure the
Disk is set to slave as it might be picking up the new
drive as the primary drive on the system.

 

[Guest]

-----Original Message-----
Hi there,

you may need to edit the Boot.ini file on the rescue disk
to reflect the new disk you added, also make sure the
Disk is set to slave as it might be picking up the new
drive as the primary drive on the system.
. I've been able to 'boot' my 'C' drive partition when I

get the message 'NTLDR is missing' by leaving the OS CD in
the CD ROM - but my 'D' partition was lost under 'FAT 32'
it is now 'NTFS' after I used the Recovery Console on the
OS CD (Windows 2000 Pro). Do you know how I can get
the 'FAT 32' on the 'D' partition back? Anyway try leaving
the OS CD in the CD ROM - it should start normally, at
least mine does...

 

[Overlord]

Thanks Bjorn,

I will give it a try, but unfortunately I don't think it
will work as the suggested fix depends upon me being to
access C: which is unreadable.

I haven't read the article so I don't know how you are defining
"access C: ".
I DL and burn to CD a copy of Linux called Knoppix.
It boots from CD and runs entirely in RAM and doesn't care if you have
a hard drive in the system or not, but will "access" the drives that
are there if you want it to. On my system it finds and loads it's own
drivers for my dual SCSI cards, dual NICs (1 onboard gigabit), onboard
sound, etc, and lets me smurf the internet from my cable modem even if
Win is trashed on the hard drive. Also I can swap around whatever
files I like on the drives and none of them is open, up to and
including copying the entire disk to another drive (minus MBR).
Makes for a great backup and also I use it at work to find and
"insert" either backed up or "misplaced" win NT****** files to make
crashed Win drives bootable.
Worth a shot....

However, the article did contain a link to an alternative
problem/fix which I think will help - so thanks for your
help in pointing me in the right direction.

"Changing Active Partition Can Make Your System Unbootable"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-
US;228004

Regards,
Mark.

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