Windows

Delpart is silent and deadly.
It has deleted the partition in NT's eyes.
If the other operating systems can still see it could you backup, then reformat the partition in NT then Restore?

Most likely, your master boot record is toast. I've had some success with using a Windows95 boot disk and re-writing the MBR with fdisk /mbr.

You can then create a new partition and explicitly set it to active and that may solve the problem.

Alternately, you could use Boot Magic, System Commander or [Linux} lilo to write an MBR that re-directs the NT boot loader and that might work as well.

Also, just for completeness, I'm assuming that this drive is the Master on the Primary IDE channel and the CMOS drive geometry is correct.

best wishes with this interesting problem...

paul

The drive should be salvageable.. If you have Norton SystemWorks (or Norton Utilities) available, try running NDD32 against the drive and see if it sees the problem. If it does, allow NDD to correct the problem.

Alternatively, try using PartitionMagic 5.x to scan and rewrite critical structures without having to damage data. While FDISK does work, it is terribly destructive, and the problems it can and does cause are too high. For me, FDISK is a last resort when nothing else works. FDISK /MBR rewrites a standard Master Boot Record, and will DISCONNECT multi-OS managers, often leaving those OS'es almost unusable.