I changed XP Active Partition, trying to recover; help?

[mengland]

I'm unable to boot and get "NTLDR is missing" error message.

I've executed some of the things recommend in:

http://www.techimo.com/forum/t37563.html

including fixboot and fixmbr.

I believe this happened because I (mistakenly) changed my Windows XP active partition to a disk that is not bootable. (I also deleted a parition, but it had no program/OS info on it for which I'm aware; my original WinXP partition is still there.) I did this wit PartitionMagic.

Any suggestions? I suspect my WinXP partition is ok and need not be rewritten, but rather that I can set/reset a boot record or something that can set the "pointers" right.

For what it's worth: when I boot the WinXP recovery console from the WinXP cdrom, my WinXP on-disk parition gets mapped to E: while a non-OS/data partition gets mapped to C:. Maybe this is reflective of the key problem?

Thanks for any help,
-Matt

[mengland]

A little clarification: I've done the the things below and my problem persists.

I've executed some of the things recommend in:
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t37563.html
including fixboot and fixmbr.

-Matt

[mengland]

Another thing I forgot: My WinXP partition was originally loaded at C: (and now it's mapped to E: in the recovery console).

-Matt

[Gettinbye]

If you're using the FAT32 filing system, you should be able to edit your boot.ini file through Dos to point to the proper partition. Currently your boot.ini would look like this (assuming D: is another partition and that you're running XP Pro) :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3\WINDOWS="Micros oft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

You'll need it to look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1\WINDOWS="Micros oft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

You'll also need to check the SRDISKID file on your first partition. It should have one letter, C
The other partition should have the SRDISKID file with the letter E

hope this helps...

[mengland]

I believe my WinXP parition is a NTFS and not FAT32 file system.



However, maybe this info can end up be quite useful, anyway, if I can get some bootable floppy/cd/disk to edit NTFS filesystem? Or maybe I can just load XP on an open space and do some surgery on my other XP partition from there (don't want to reload everything because it just takes too long).

Thanks for this note and such quick response!!
-Matt

[mengland]

The best thing I've found thus far is Partitoin Magic's rescue disks, that can boot by themselves and run a version of PM7 in it's little kernel. -Matt