C: partition not recognized

[vulcano2060]

Hi!

I have a little problem with my primary partition, i use windows, no linux experience (but heard of knoppix...).

My PC Specs:
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Sony Vaio PCV-RX55m
P4 1.8GHz
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HD1
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C: partition - FAT32 (WINXP Home)
E: partition - NTFS (Backup partition)
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HD2
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D: unpartitioned - FAT32 (Backup drive)
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The thing is that my system was excelent, but a friend of mine had a windows problem and coudn't boot his pc... so he asked for help from me, and i told him, he could backup the data on his HD attaching it to my computer as a slave drive. So we did, but unsuccesfully (the computer rebooted again and again) so i put his HD as primary master and mine (HD1) as slave, i booted knoppix to have access to his HD and copy his data to my backup part (e:), it went fine then.

But after i reattached my hds as they were before we do nothing (c: part as primary, d: as backup drive and e: as backup part) i couldn't boot windows xp home and an error message appeared on screen before the winxp bootscreen showed up: "Invalid boot.ini loaded from c:\windows"... everything screwed up...


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THE WEIRDEST THINGS:
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* MS-DOS recognizes my primary partition (c:) and my backup drive (d:) but not my backup partition (e:).

* Knoppix recognizes all drives, but i don't have acces to my primary partition (c:), when i try to open it, it says:

"Could not mount device.
The error reported was:
Mount: I could not determine the filesystem type,
and none was specified."

I checked with QTParted the filesystem type and it says my primary partition has an unknown type. WHAT HAPPENED???
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I tried every method to fix the boot.ini problem but nothing happened, so i backed up my files with winrar for dos from ms-dos and copied it to my backup drive (d:).


NOW
The questions are..

1. ¿If I format the primary partition (c:) from knoppix, there should be no problem at all if i want to install windows xp on it? (no conflicts)

2. MS-DOS didn't recognize my primary partition (c:), If i format c: from ms-dos, ¿Will it erase the entire drive (c: and e: parts) or just the c: partition even if it's not recognized?

3. ¿Which would be the best method to format my c: partition safely, with no risks on deleting my e: partition in the process?


PLEASE HELP!!!!!
NEVER HAPPENED SOMETHING LIKE THIS BEFORE!!!

and i don't want to lose all the stuff in the backup part...

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Thanks
Tony