Hi,
I have an old Toshiba laptop. A while ago I replaced the 6GB drive with a 40GB drive, and whatever I tried using Windows 98 it froze after a while with the new drive, so I upgraded to XP, and it has been working great.
Only I only have 2GB for partition C:, so I can’t upgrade XP to SP2.
Today I took out the drive, used Ghost to make a backup and then tried Partition Magic which told me I had invalid partitioning on it (I think error 105, marking the partition BAD).
So I tried a few things, e.g. using another PC to repartition the drive from within XP and copying the files over – that didn’t work, probably because the boot sector was not copied (I am no novice with partitioning, but I don’t have any detailed knowledge about it).
Anything I tried failed, so I figured I’d try putting my backup back to the laptop hard drive, but resizing the partitions in Ghost while copying.
That took 3 hours, but my laptop doesn’t like the drive anymore. I tried Partition Magic on it now, same error. I tried other partitioning programs and found that two partitions overlap, so I deleted ALL partitions except the boot partition – still nothing.
I then used the XP CD to start Recovery Console and use FIXMBR, and now at least Partition Magic doesn’t complain anymore, but the Laptop still won’t start.
I started from a Bart PE CD (basically a small version of XP that can boot from CD), and the drive appears healthy and normal in Disk Management, and in NTFSPro from another boot CD I can access the files on it, so I have no clue why the Laptop refuses to boot from the drive.
What info do you need through which program in order to help me?
I am sure there are people out there who can write a partitioning table and boot record with a disk editor, so someone has got to be able to help me here 😉
I’d hate to reinstall it (I’d have to restore a lot of registry entries, e.g. email client etc.), so any help or suggestion you have would be greatly appreciated!
cu, Richard