P
Paul
Help, people
Can't get my system to boot as a result, I think, of messing with the active
partition. How can I reset it?
I have been trying to expand my 4GB boot partition and bought Partition
Manager (from Paragon) for this purpose. Had a bit of trouble installing the
product (caused, allegedly by InstallShield) and this morning tried to run
the partition resizing utility. At this point I was just shrinking the D:
partitiion to release space for expanding C. On the required reboot,
Partition Manager went into 'blue screen' mode but stalled at 99% of a disk
checking routine. I disappeared up the other end of the office for 10
minutes to check the on-line manual and got back to see a regular Win 2K
start up screen but one reporting insufficient paging file size plus a load
of other error messages. When it finished, I discovered I had no D: drive.
I ran disk manager in Windows (disks are all NTFS) and saw that the disk was
reported as good but it had no drive letter. I set it to D: and rebooted.
Trouble is, I also marked the partition as active (though not, AFAICR,
bootable). Not sure why I did this but, anyway, when the system came back
up, it didn't.
I have booted up from the SBS2K install disks and run Recovery Console.
Diskpart tells me that I have:
Drive C: (which looks like the previously missing logical drive D: in the
extended partition),
Drive E: (which seems to be the old drive C
;
Drive D: (a small Fat32 partition containing Dell utilities);
Drive G (separate dynamic disk).
However, all it will let me do with these is delete them - which is
definitely not what I want.
What I do want is to be able to change the active partition back to the old
Drive C: but I cannot figure out how to do this. In the good old Fat32/Win9x
days, I would have run Fdisk from a floppy boot disk and switched the active
partition. I don't think I can use Fdisk off an old Win98 disk without
breaking NTFS. As I can't get W2K up, I can't run the disk manager to
reverse my initial mistake. I am reluctant to use either of the bootfix or
MBRfix utilities in the Recovery Consule as I have no idea what they
actually do (and I am discouraged by the 'press this and die!' warning
messages you get when you select them). I think what i need is a boot
manager utility which will run from a floppy and will let me switch the
active partition back to the one that actually has the boot sector and MBR
on it. Ironically, I've got one - from Paragon (remember them? They broke my
system in the first place!) - but I hadn't got around to creating the floppy
disk and the software is on the Drive G which I can't get at.
So your clever people out there:
* am I guessing right that I have broken my system by changing the active
partition to a non-bootable one;
* is there anything which ships with SBS which might fix it - and
doesn't require Windows to be actually working first;
* or can someone point me to a downloadable utility (preferably free or
share ware) which might help me out of my predicament.
I'd be very grateful. This is a workgroup server supporting 12 users - all
of whom are going to find life very difficult on Monday if I can't fix this
tomorrow. I've x-posted to a couple of Windows 2000 groups as this is
probably not an SBS-specific problem.
Thanks for listening.
Paul
Can't get my system to boot as a result, I think, of messing with the active
partition. How can I reset it?
I have been trying to expand my 4GB boot partition and bought Partition
Manager (from Paragon) for this purpose. Had a bit of trouble installing the
product (caused, allegedly by InstallShield) and this morning tried to run
the partition resizing utility. At this point I was just shrinking the D:
partitiion to release space for expanding C. On the required reboot,
Partition Manager went into 'blue screen' mode but stalled at 99% of a disk
checking routine. I disappeared up the other end of the office for 10
minutes to check the on-line manual and got back to see a regular Win 2K
start up screen but one reporting insufficient paging file size plus a load
of other error messages. When it finished, I discovered I had no D: drive.
I ran disk manager in Windows (disks are all NTFS) and saw that the disk was
reported as good but it had no drive letter. I set it to D: and rebooted.
Trouble is, I also marked the partition as active (though not, AFAICR,
bootable). Not sure why I did this but, anyway, when the system came back
up, it didn't.
I have booted up from the SBS2K install disks and run Recovery Console.
Diskpart tells me that I have:
Drive C: (which looks like the previously missing logical drive D: in the
extended partition),
Drive E: (which seems to be the old drive C
;Drive D: (a small Fat32 partition containing Dell utilities);
Drive G (separate dynamic disk).
However, all it will let me do with these is delete them - which is
definitely not what I want.
What I do want is to be able to change the active partition back to the old
Drive C: but I cannot figure out how to do this. In the good old Fat32/Win9x
days, I would have run Fdisk from a floppy boot disk and switched the active
partition. I don't think I can use Fdisk off an old Win98 disk without
breaking NTFS. As I can't get W2K up, I can't run the disk manager to
reverse my initial mistake. I am reluctant to use either of the bootfix or
MBRfix utilities in the Recovery Consule as I have no idea what they
actually do (and I am discouraged by the 'press this and die!' warning
messages you get when you select them). I think what i need is a boot
manager utility which will run from a floppy and will let me switch the
active partition back to the one that actually has the boot sector and MBR
on it. Ironically, I've got one - from Paragon (remember them? They broke my
system in the first place!) - but I hadn't got around to creating the floppy
disk and the software is on the Drive G which I can't get at.
So your clever people out there:
* am I guessing right that I have broken my system by changing the active
partition to a non-bootable one;
* is there anything which ships with SBS which might fix it - and
doesn't require Windows to be actually working first;
* or can someone point me to a downloadable utility (preferably free or
share ware) which might help me out of my predicament.
I'd be very grateful. This is a workgroup server supporting 12 users - all
of whom are going to find life very difficult on Monday if I can't fix this
tomorrow. I've x-posted to a couple of Windows 2000 groups as this is
probably not an SBS-specific problem.
Thanks for listening.
Paul