1 Topic by LanceRage

  • LanceRage
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Topic: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

Hi so am running XP and I was repartitioning my hard drive, and the power cable got knocked out of my laptop and it died. Now most things don't work. I can boot from the CD drive, and that's about it. When I boot into Gparted there is a yellow warning triangle by my c drive(which is my main drive) and when I try to partition it, it won't go. I tried using the XP CD to repair but that didn't work, I did the enter for a new installation and then it gave me the option to try to repair an existing installation, but nothing doing.  Anyone have any ideas?

2 Reply by LanceRage

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

I just ran memtest86+ and it dint find anything, then for kicks I tried to do the partition operation again and it worked. However I still can't boot.

3 Reply by cmdr

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

Hello Lance,
what (resizing?) operation did you apply to what partition ? It would be essential to have the present partition table.

Use GParted's "Terminal" command
fdisk -lu
(l is lower-case L)
and give us the print-out.

Regards
cmdr

4 Reply by LanceRage

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

cmdr wrote:

Hello Lance,
what (resizing?) operation did you apply to what partition ? It would be essential to have the present partition table.

Use GParted's "Terminal" command
fdisk -lu
(l is lower-case L)
and give us the print-out.

Regards
cmdr

A while ago I parttitioned my drice into two parts (C:, D:) in order to install windows 7 on the D:. ( C: is my main drive and has XP on it.) I got bored of windows 7 and iut was taking up space, so I deleted the parttition and I was in the process of growing my C; drive to include the newly unallocated space when My computer shut down.
  Here is what is says after running fdisk -lu command
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 25005 9350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512=512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe5f1e5f1
Device Boot                       Start                           End                  Blocks          ID            System
/dev/sda1      *                    63              488392064             244196001         7            HPFS/NTFS

5 Reply by cmdr

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

Hello Lance,

due to your fdisk output, partition table shows the resized (physical) partition values. But the main time consuming process is the logical resizing of the NTFS file system. A crash or interrupt within this process is always critical. The only thing, we can do, is to make the Partition Boot Record (PBR) visible again for "GParted" ( and Windows) and hope, that the repair programs are able to get it work again. First of all, use the latest stable version of "GParted Live CD". This is a must for NTFS !
Second important thing is to know, whether you unchecked "round to cylinders" (default is checked) or not, when doing your first attempt. If it was checked, PBR was possibly moved from sector 63 to 16065 and the value in the partition table is therefore wrong.

Regards
cmdr

6 Reply by LanceRage

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

SO I have decided that at this point in time I am just going to wipe the drive and do a clean install of XP, I don't have any crucial info. and my computer could use the cleanse anyway. So how would I go about doing that, should I format the drive through Gparted to ntfs, then do a regular install from my XP cd?
THanks

7 Reply by cmdr

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Re: Powered down in middle of partitioning, won't boot

Hello Lance,

I am just going to wipe the drive and do a clean install of XP

wise decision !

So how would I go about doing that, should I format the drive through Gparted to ntfs, then do a regular install from my XP cd?

XP needs its own Master Boot Record and a primary "active" (=bootable) partition. "GParted" as a Linux program does NOT create the appropriate Boot Records for XP. Therefore you can wipe out existing partitions with "GParted", but XP installation process should install and format the new structure with its "fdisk"/"format". Be sure to choose appropriate partition sizes, so that you don't need to resize too soon again. I hope, you have your hardware drivers at hand.

Good luck
cmdr