Ok, I went to install Vista RC1, but first I had to repartition my hard drive. I opened up Partition Magic 8 and resized my only partition on the drive from 310GB to 250GB, and I told it to complete the operation. It reminded me that I should back up (naturally) all data on the drive just in case, but I've never had any problems and I don't really have anywhere to backup to. It also reminded me to create Rescue Diskettes, but I don't have a floppy drive so I couldn't anyway. I told it to complete the operation, it shut down and started into it's little app. at 99%, it decided to pop up with an error. I restarted the computer, and as soon as the windows logo popped up it Blue Screen'd and restarted. This repeats every time the logo shows, and I can't get into windows. So yeah, I'm hoping to recover the partition, as I suspect that it's pretty screwed up. I first tried one of my boot cd's that had partition magic on it (friend created it for me, he programs and it works pretty well) and I got an error... Then I integrated Partition Magic (from my other computer, which I'm writing this on) into UBCD, and I got a similar error. Then I tried a burnt copy of my friend's PM8 (I lost my disc long ago...) and I got a "1. FD 1.44MB System Type-(06)" message after the "Boot CD:" message, and it hangs (blinking _, but my keyboard won't input anything (like 1)). So yeah, I'm sorry if this isn't in the right place, but does anyone have any ideas as to how this could be recovered from? I'd like to at least recover my data... I've got an SATA Drive if that helps (I suspect for no good reason that that's why I'm getting the error I am when I try my two custom boot cd's.)
I would slave the drive in another machine and copy the data to a known good drive. Reinstall the OS with the partitions you want, then bring your data back over (using a LAN preferrably). Then you can install RC1 on the newly created partition. I would first download a diag program from the HDD manufacterers website and run it to guarantee the drive is healthy. ~Rich
Yeah, the drive's plenty healthy, but I'm next-to-positive that at least the end of the partition is corrupted, somehow... I'm not entirely sure that just plugging it in will work... And anyway, I don't have a desktop (aside from the one that's now painfully crippled) with SATA in it, so my current gameplan is to install windows on an Ultra ATA drive on the messed up machine, and see if I can get windows to read the SATA Partition. If it doesn't, I'll install Partition Magic and see if it can possibly repair the partition (it screwed it up, eh? Maybe it can un-screw it up. Hehehe, hopefully.) Any way it happens, I'd really rather not lose that installation of XP... I have a lot of programs that I'd rather not have to find CD keys for (many online-distributed programs that'll be a pain to find registration info for, for instance). Anyway, I don't think it's necessarily something wrong with the drive itself... I run SpinRite on it monthly to make sure nothing's bad. However, a couple parts of the drive have not wanted their data to be moved (I use DiskKeeper for defragging on my machines, but their were large fragments that it wouldn't move... I'm afraid those fragments couldn't be moved when PM tried to partition, and that may have resulted in the error I got during the operation... something to do with file something-or-other), I guess my current step is to bring out an IDE drive, install windows onto it, and go from there. I'll post when I get that done. Thanks for the help!
