[SOLVED] XP partition thinks its FAT16

I had a dual boot system with a 40GB disc split evenly in two between XP and Vista.

/dev/hda
[          WinXP          |          Vista          ]
/dev/hda1                 /dev/hda2

I got tired of Vista and wanted to get rid of the OS and resize my XP partition to be larger.

Knowing Vista, I knew that it had done something with the boot loader where it had set its own as the default loader so before erasing the Vista partition I looked up what I had to do in order to set XP's loader as the default.

After looking through some forums I found two important pieces of information:

" Fras   says:

I was unable to modify the boot order and defaults from within XP. Vista uses a new system. So, if you wish to remove Vista, be very careful. Don't just blunder in from XP and remove the partition... The technique that I used was to boot off the XP CD and enter a recovery console. Then, after logging is as administrator, type FIXBOOT followed by FIXMBR and exit to reboot. It goes without saying that you should be sure that you have a backup before doing this. You do, don't you? This will get you back to your original XP boot process."

...AND...

"the easiest way to revert back from a dual boot scenario.

Uninstall
After playing around with Vista for a few days, you may want to remove it from your system, and reclaim the hard drive space. Microsoft has made this step very simple as well.

Boot your computer in to Windows XP.
Ensure you have the Vista DVD image emulated or in the DVD drive.
Go to "Start" and "Run". Type in "e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force" (without quotes, and replacing e: with the drive letter of your Vista DVD).
Restart the computer, and you will notice the boot selection menu is gone.
Format the partition/drive where you had Vista installed.
Remove two files (Boot.BAK & Bootsect.BAK) on your XP drive's root folder (C: ), these were backup files of your previous bootloader, now no longer useful.
Optional: Restart to ensure it still works.
Use your partition software to merge your partitions together.

Now, feeling I knew what I needed to know, I did the following.

put in the Vista dvd and ran
d:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force

It worked, when restarting the PC I didn't see it use Vista's boot loader and simply boot straight into XP.

I then restarted and booted off the GParted 0.3 cd.

Now, remember my main goal was to expand my primary partition's size and basically reformat the rest as my 2nd partition.

Here's where I believe things went wrong.

When the PC finished booting and loading, I used GParted to
1) remove the Vista partition
2) remove the extended partition in which the Vista partition was in
3) RESIZED the XP partiton from about 20 gigs to around 30 gigs

I closed GParted and tried to boot normally.

I got the following error:
A disk read error occurred.
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart

At this point I wasn't really thinking clearly (due to the panic setting in) and I assumed the boot loader swapping steps I took earlier didn't work so I tried the other setps.

I booted off a XP setup disc and entered the Recovery Console.

I then ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR.

At this point, just to make sure, I used the DIR command in the XP partition and the files were all still intact and fine.

I rebooted.

I got the same error again so I tried the Recovery Console again and ran the two commands again, out of order.

I rebooted again and now I was getting a different error.  I can't remember what the error was but I don't think its too important as the next things I'll say will tell you clearly what the problem was.

I booting up with GParted but when it booted, I noticed an oddity.  The XP partition was shown as a white rectangle with a green outline but instead it was outlined in grey/black and was being recognized as an unformated/erronious space.

At this point, my memory gets foggy and I don't remember what I did but it was surely more attempts at the previous steps.

The next time I booted into GParted, the partition was showing up as a FAT12.

I then took the drive out of my PC and put it into a working XP machine.

I opened up Partition Magic and all it said about it was that it was erronious.

I tried looking at it with Restorer2000, a file non-intrusive recovery program which you can use recover deleted files and it was finding just a few non-deleted files that were named using what appeared to be random ascii characters for file names.

At this point I went over to irc.gnome.org #gparted and asked for help.

I managed to confuse someone there as much as I was confused but they were able to suggest that I boot in using the GParted disc, run fdisk and try setting the type to 7, NTFS.

I tried this but before I set the type, noticed that the type was already NTFS.  I exited fdisk without making any changes and mounted the partition.

I used LS -L in the mounted partition and now I saw a listing that was more familiar to what I would see when I used DIR on a day that the drive was working fine.  The file names were still random ascii characters but it felt like I was getting closer.

I re-opened GParted.  At this point, the partition was showing up as a FAT16 drive.  Of course, the drive usage and maximum size was completely wrong as it had been since the first time it showed up as FAT12, last time.

At this point, I'm thinking I need to undo the resizing I did and somehow rebuild the partition tables and all that kind of configuration/database files.

I asked my irc friend for advice and he suggested I post my problem here in this forum so that I could have more input.

HERE is where I'd like to kind as for your help.

Does anyone have any advice that could help me, at the very least, be able to copy important files off the drive so that I may reformat the whole thing and freshly install my OS's and partitions?

I thank you all in advance for helping me and putting up with me and my problem.