PC can't find OS

[Suchy]

I was playing around with Virtual PC, and I forgot that I had the Dos 6 CD in my drive, and when I restarted my PC, Dos started to instal so I canceled.

After a restart I got a message " No OS found" and I could not acces Win 98 or XP, so I formated C and reinstaled Win 98 on C, but other partitions (one with XP) are not showing up.

How can I get them to show up so tht I will be able to acces the files on them, and boot Win XP once again?

[pangea33]

Did you have the XP partition formatted as NTFS? Win98 can't read or write to an NTFS partition. You'll probably have to use one of the bootable CDs like EBCD to boot and read, if you just want to get files into Win98. For recovering from that disaster, and getting back to dual boot, I don't know what you'll have to do.

DOS 6 never came on a bootable cd, because it doesn't even recognize the hardware in order to load CDROM drivers off that CD you're supposed to be booting from. I'm curious as to what sort of Frankenstein thing you're booting from.

[Suchy]

No, I had all my partitions in Fat (16 I believe).
Before I had a dual boot and could access all the partitions in either system.

As for the dos, I found an CD image online and burned it onto a CD usind Nero.

[pangea33]

I'm a bit fascinated by that since I'm having a hard time understanding it. Maybe there isn't really any magic now that most bios can boot from CD. I guess I'm just thinking back to how it used to be.

I imagine the MBR has been corrupted, and now the OS has no idea that the XP partition exists. TeraByte Unlimited's BootItNG is a tool that can help you find the lost partitions, but you'll need someone more knowledgeable than me to tell you how.

Here's a link, maybe you can get some ideas from their site: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

[Suchy]

I just connected this HD as a slave to another Windows XP computer and it is also not recognizing the partitions, except the one with Win 98 on it.

Well basicly the rest of the HD is Unallocated,

So how can I fix that?

[pangea33]

Placing that drive in various machines isn't going to help. The problem is with your drive's partition information, not your OS. It would seem that you didn't take time to follow the link I sent earlier. That tool will help you resolve your problem.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=231

Section 3 - Undeleting missing partitions:

If you were not limiting primaries and had your EMBR on HD0 overwritten by GRUB, you could now be missing some partitions on HD0. This can include the partition that BootIt NG was installed to, if that partition was on HD0. In the majority of cases, the missing partition(s) can be recovered by using the Undelete feature in Partition Work.

To use this feature, highlight a free space area on HD0 where you expect the missing partition(s) to be, and then select the Undelete button on the right. BootIt NG will proceed to search for partitions, and undelete those it can find and identify. Allow the process to complete, and then take a look at the results. If it finds all missing partitions, you are finished.

If not, there are some cases where the Undelete process will undelete remnants of old (previously deleted) partitions that are no longer valid. Finding and undeleting these partitions can prevent it from finding valid partitions that are still missing. If this is the case, you need to first delete all invalid partitions that it found, making sure to use the "Clear Boot Sector" option when deleting them (of course, do not delete any valid partitions that it found). Then, highlight the free space area again, and repeat the Undelete process. It may take a few iterations of this process to find and undelete all missing partitions.

[Paul Komski]

Pangea, I think your last post is particularly confusing. The link refers to a situation when Linux has been installed "over" BootIt-NG running as a boot manager with more than the normal 4 primary partition tables. AFAIK neither Linux nor BiNG are involved in this situation.

There is also little magic in how bootable CD's work. In the main they emulate other devices, usually floppy diskettes, and can behave just like a floppy with one important difference; the CD cant be written to in the way a floppy can so the only way to have proper i/o is to utilise the hard drive or setup and use a ram drive; ram drives are commonly setup using the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

It actually looks as if this drive has been, if not actually, then effectively fdisked as well as the C: drive having been formatted. The initial installation (of any OS prior to WinXP) would have replaced WinXP's boot sector rendering WinXP unbootable. The fix for that at that time would have been to have run fixboot from the recovery console.

On the assumption that Win98 and WinXP were being dual-booted from a common boot.ini file on the old C: drive then formatting C: either for Win98 or for DOS, would have deleted ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini as well as replacing the wrong boot sector.

The fact that another WinXP installation can only see unallocated space leaves you now with two different potential problems. First of restoring the missing WinXP partition and then (as long as WinXP was originally being booted from boot.ini on Win98's C: drive) or restoring the boot files and the boot sector.

All of this can be done but it really depends on what the priority is. Recovery of the original system or recovery of data (and whether this is small or large in amount).

You could try rebuilding the partition tables using software such as Active@ Partition Table Recovery (http://www.partition-recovery.com/download.htm) or Partition Table Doctor (http://www.ptdd.com/ptdmoreinfo.htm) not free or just run GetDataBack for NTFS (if the WinXP partition was NTFS) to recover data file by file for free.

If you know that WinXP's partitions immediately followed the C drive and you know whether it was primary or logical and whether it was FAT or NTFS then it might well be quite easy to manually edit the partition table using Symantec's PTedit.

[pangea33]

Pangea, I think your last post is particularly confusing. The link refers to a situation when Linux has been installed "over" BootIt-NG...
My apologies. I realize that Suchy isn't dealing with a Linux problem, because it was never mentioned here. I had a couple tabs open while looking for partition info, and actually wanted to paste something else.

Even the info I intended to post may not be that useful, so I won't try pasting more paragraphs. I just wanted to make mention of the subject just in case...

Why are One or More Partitions not Visible from My OS when They Should Be, or Why are They Visible from My OS when They Shouldn't Be?
From: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=043

[Paul Komski]

In my irritation (sorry) at seeing all the irrelevant stuff about GRUB etc I bypassed using BiNG as a recovery tool. But it is worth trying it that way. One would unzip the download and boot to the floppy or CD but click cancel to Not set it up on the hard drive but to enter Maintenance Mode. Then, as per their pdf file:-

1 On the desktop, click Partition Work.
2 In the Partitions list, select the free-space entry that you want to undelete, and then click
Undelete under Actions.
3 In the Undelete dialog box that appears, click OK to recover missing FAT, HPFS, NTFS,
Ext2fs, ReiserFS, and Extended partitions or volumes.
Note
• If the partition or volume recovered is not correct, select it in the Partition list, click Delete,
select the Clear Boot Sector check box, click OK, and then repeat steps 2 and 3.

[Suchy]

I used Partition Table Doctor 3 and got the partitions back (except one with the win XP) but thats ok. Because the hard drive had 5 partitions:

C: had Win 98
D: had Win XP
E: was blank (waiting for Fedora Core to be instaled there)
F: all the programs were instaled there
G: had other files


Because the hard drive was set up like that, I did not lose anything except time reinstaling XP.

Once again thanks for the links !