partition headaches

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Thu Jul 27 13:35:21 UTC 2006


On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 06:36:43PM -0400, jim ruxton wrote:
> Hi, I recently reinstalled Fedora (went from 3 to 5) . Rather than doing
> an upgrade I did a complete reinstall. Everything went well till I
> decided to create a FAT32 partition on my Windows partition . I dual
> boot this machine. I was using Partition Magic while trying to create
> the FAT32 partition. Next time I booted using Grub into my Windows
> partition Windows wouldn't load. My files are still there and I can
> mount them using ntfsmount in linux but can't start windows. When I load
> the windows systems CD that came with my laptop I can't start Windows
> either. I really don't want to wipe my nice new FC5 to reload Windows.
> Any thoughts what I can do to get Windows back? Here is the output of
> fdisk -l ? Thanks.
> 
> jim
> 
> 
> Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *        3951        7296    26876713+   7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2               1          13      104391   83  Linux
> /dev/hda3              14        3950    31623952+  8e  Linux LVM
> 
> Partition table entries are not in disk order
> 
> Disk /dev/dm-0: 31.2 GB, 31272730624 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3802 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
> Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
> 
> Disk /dev/dm-1: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
> Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

I don't see ANY FAT32 partitions anywhere.  I only see an NTFS.

What exactly did you do in partition magic?

Your partitions are not in disk order.  Windows HATES that in my
experience.  It may in fact be the cause of the problem.

After all if windows originally was the first partition, then it's boot
loader will have something like disk(0)part(0) or something similar in
the boot.ini, while if you moved it and put other partitions in front,
not NTFS is technically the 3rd partition on the disk, and should have
boot.ini changed to disk(0)part(2).  Best advice is to NEVER move the
first windows partition, it should always be the first partition on the
boot drive if you want windows to work reliably.  You can work around
it, but it is generally more fragile.

--
Len Sorensen
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