DESPERATE: I screwed up my hard drive PLEASE HELP

[sdat1333]

I was trying to make a partition for knoppix using qtparted. Now I can't boot into Win XP Home. I booted of the windows CD and opened the recovery console and executed fixmbr and fixboot. Fixboot returned some type of error about not being able to find the system drive or something like that. Please help, I hate reinstalling windows. btw, I can see all my files through knoppix, so all hope is not lost.

[kozmo403]

You might want to try a utility called the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD, available at www.ultimatebootcd.com). It is a collection of floppy boot disk images and utilities that are run from a CD, so it is quite a bit faster than a standard floppy. There is a program win that image that will allow you to set any partition on your HD active (Ranish Partition Manager, which can be downloaded by itself, but i recomend the UBCD). Give that a try. If that doesn't work, wipe and reinstall my friend.

[mnzs]

An alternative to what sdat1333 suggests can be the following.
(At least the following has worked for me in the past):
If you have any (new, old, it doesn't really matter) Mandrake, Suse, Fedora installation CD, boot from it and make a basic installation.
At the end of the installation they will put LILO or GRUB on the MBR.
If LILO/GRUB find a usable Windows partition, they will put it in the initial boot menu and allow you to boot it absolutely fine.
A side benefit can be that this "temporary" installation will have partitioned your disk (if you chose the "auto" partitioning) so that you can subsequently use the Linux partitions for your Knoppix installation.
(Obviously, you don't need to accept the "auto" partitioning. During the installation of Mandrake/Suse/Fedora you can intervene and make your own partition scheme).

[mnzs]

Obviously I meant: "an alternative to what kosmo403 suggests".
I simply got the names wrong.

[cintra]

Before going mad could it be an idea to have a look at your xp partition again with qtparted and see if its marked under status and the operations menu as 'active'..?

regards

[sdat1333]

I went into qtparted and it said that the Win XP partition was not active. I set it to active but after I exited and opened qtpart again the change didnt stick. Please help me.

[eon]

Hi, In qtparted you need to click the "commit" icon that is under the menu heading "Operations" in order to save your changes (upper left hand corner of the qtparted GUI). I think you also need to be root to do this-you definately need to be root to use qtparted from a hard drive install. I don't remember what the live cd allows.

For anyone have booting problems I will put in a plug for my favorite loader. In fact when I was running the notroiously flakey windows on this computer (for games)
this: http://freshmeat.net/projects/gujin/ bootloader booted windows when nothing else would.

[sdat1333]

Thanks, the only problem is I ended up reinstalling before I saw your post. Oh well...