Help!!!! Powerquest Help Needed, I Cant Boot Anything!!!

[payam08]

IM SORRY IM REALLY REALLY IN BIG TROULBE RIGHT NOW, ANY QUICK HELP IS APPRECIATED. I AM ON MY FRIENDS COMPUTER, SEEING THAT MINE IS TOTALLY MESSED UP
i wanted to try to dual boot, so i got powerquest
last night i installed bootmagic, and after seeing that its not what i wanted, i just closed it and never uninstalled it.
i then installed partition magic. i went into the "install another oeprating wizard" and went thru the steps selecting to install the OS later, and it made it 3GB of ap artition. when i clicked finish, i thought this was a bad idae and tried to delete it, but it said it needed to reboot.
after about 30 minutes of making a partition in a blue screen at startup, it restarted and bootmagic came up
before i go on, i have a compaq. this computer has 2 drives. one is the windows recovery drive (liek a windows cd except in a hd, nothing more), and the other is just my primary drive.
now when i restart, bootmagic tells me theres two windows. thats fine. the first one is the recovery windows hd and the 2nd is my primary windows.
i go to the 2nd, and it sends me thru normal bootup, until i hit the windows loading screen with teh animated bar. 2 seconds into that i get a quick blue flash and it restarts all over again to bootmagicc?!?!?!
I tried doing it on safe mode or anything, and it does the same thing. when i go into my first windows (windows recovery hd) it does the same thing. but at one point it said that ih ave no user partition or something along the sort of that. lemme try to get it up brb...
it gets me into the screen when i go into the recovery hd that i need to create a user partition again, and it will restore to factory. so i continue. but it stops me and says SYSTEM RECORE CANNOT CONTINUE! USER PARTITION NOT CREATED! and then restarts on me.
now if i go to my 2nd hd (the normal one, 160gb) and hold f10 to go into its system recovory, it gives me a message ona blue screen
"A problem has been detected and windows needs to shut down to prevent damage to you computer
Disable or unintall any antivirus, disk defrag, or backup utilities. Check your hard drive configuration, updated drivers, and run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart computer

***STOP: 0x00000024 (0x001901FF, 0x82379578, 0xE0000102, 0x00000000)
"
One problem, I CANT EVEN BOOT ANYTHING UP
im sorry, im just really anxious right now cause i keep thinking its fried forever..

quick rsp needed!!! thanks!!!

[Sylvander]

Which Windows are you running? [rather vital detail!]

I'm not expert enough on this topic, but will do what I can until someone more knowledgeable comes along.

Seems to me like you've messed up your MBR [could be your (NTFS?) file system].
Good news would be that if the right thing is done it will be fixed in an instant just like magic and you'll be up and running again.

But what is the right thing?

Now, when I was running Win98SE and also recently whilst running Win2000pro I fixed my MBR using the "Emergency Boot CD" [EBCD] "Recover MBR" program [on the 2nd menu].
This fixed my system in a flash [about 1/2 second to write the new MBR].
It writes a generic MBR to the HDD specified as the boot drive by the BIOS.
[I think Paul Komski (the real expert) recommends the use of the "fdisk /mbr" command to rebuild the MBR]

1. How to make a free “Smart Boot Manager” floppy
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498
This makes it easier to boot a chosen drive [particularly the one holding the EBCD].

2. How to make a free EBCD bootable CD
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41485
This has a number of useful utilities included including "Image" [for DOS, by Terabyte] & "File Manager".

My guess is that the STOP: 0x00000024 error is misleading [I may well be wrong in that].
In case I'm wrong about that, you should use the EBCD "Microsoft Scandisk" [2nd menu][don't know if it can scan NTFS, always used it on FAT32] to scan the file systems on the partition[s] and fix any errors found [don't scan for bad clusters].
Alternatively, you could use the instructions in the Microsoft page linked above.

[Paul Komski]

Even though it is not totally clear what your partition arrangements are it sounds like you have WinXP and have installed boot magic and have created a new partition.

Creating a new partition can mean that the boot.ini references are incorrect which sends you into the loop at the loading phase - though this is more usually associated with a message such as ntldr or hal.dll or ntoskrln.exe is missing or corrupt type message.

fdisk /mbr would remove boot magic but it has other effects and I would prefer to simply uninstall boot magic from within windows at a later stage.

I suggest you create a BiNG boot floppy or CD (link in my sig). Then from Partition Work select the relevant Hard Drive and highlight the Partition where the Operating System boots from. Use the Properties Button and then the Edit Button and use the arrow key to shift down to boot.ini. Open boot.ini and write down the rdisk() and partition() values for any line(s) under operating systems. Please also note how many partitions are shown in the hard drive(s). EDIT: How many primaries (each full line) and how many logicals (indented lines).

Post the results back here and we can advise how to edit the boot.ini file or the partition tables appropriately.

I am moving this thread to the storage section.

[Sylvander]

As an alternative...

The EBCD "File Manager" will allow you to browse the files on your various drives [including C:] and manipulate those files.
e.g. You could navigate to the Boot.ini file [is it in the root folder?], read its contents, and copy the file to a floppy disk [drive B: is the floppy in this program].
Then you could take that floppy to another PC [must try editing a text file using "File Manager". Will get back when I've tried that], read the file, edit it, bring it back, rename the old, and replace the old copy with the new copy.

[Sylvander]

That worked!

Used the EBCD File Manager to...
1. "Edit" an ini file [a test file I made and gave an ini extension, whilst within the Windows environment].
2. "Save" the changed ini file.
3. "Read" the changed ini file [the changes were there].

[Paul Komski]

You could navigate to the Boot.ini file

The reason for using BiNG is that even if the system drive is an NTFS partition the file can be edited directly. Also it is possile to manipulate the partition tables directly should that be needed. The EBCD utilities can read but not write to NTFS partitions and adding another unnecessary application just adds a non-essential element of complexity to the situation IMHO.

[Sylvander]

"The EBCD utilities can read but not write to NTFS partitions"
Oops, didn't know that; learning all the time.
And that's very useful for me to know. Now how do I engrave that on my memory?

Many thanks.