Last nite I installed an 80 gig hard drive on my system. I spilt it in half. It ended up as about 37gig and 38gig split. I used the partitioning disk that came with the Maxtor drive.
I then booted up a utility disc that i have to see if i can use its partitioning software to squeeze out my remaining space. I discovered a utility called BootMagic from PowerQuest on it. This util will allow you to Boot operating systems that reside on the disc. It saw my XP and Linux OSes, as well as my other partitions. Since i never fixed my bootloader for Linux it has been a long time since i booted into it so i decided to boot it. Upon reboot nothing booted. I went back into BootMagic and it had tried to make one of my new partitions bootable and it hid my XP part. There are no other options in this bootable ap but which partition you want to boot. Once I told it to boot XP everything seemed to be fine. Until I noticed that now i could not see my Data partition with 10 gigs of Data from XP! I did a search on the internet and i read that you cant hide partitions but with Partition Magic. I tried and upon starting Partition Magic, the bootable version, it was telling me my sectors are wrong, or something like that. So it wouldnt go.
I then booted Knoppix to try and copy my files over from my hidden partition. I was able to see this partition but i couldnt write to my new partitions. It looked like they were read only when looking at the properties. Once i changed that i was still not able to copy into them. THEN i booted into ERD Commander and was able to see my files and i was able to copy them over. So now I could access all my files from XP again, but that partition was still not viewable.
So I pondered.
I booted into Madboot and went to Dos. MadBoot has GDISK built into it. I did a gdisk /? and saw that it has a hide and unhide feature. GDISK also told me that my MBRs are overlapping? WTF does that mean? I told GDISK to unhide my hidden partition. Like so.
gdisk 1 /-hide /p:6
that tells it which fixed disk and which partion number.
Booted back into XP and there it was!
I had also noticed that the new parition was made Active by Bootmagic. With GDISK i made it inactive.
Now i need to find out about this MBR problem before i try and fix it.
Questions? COmments? Concerns?
