HDD Install tampered with my Windows partition table

**majikman** · 10-05-2004, 08:08 AM

I have two separate hdd's. one for my knoppix installation and one for my windows installation. the windows hdd is the master and linux is on the slave drive. i installed knoppix 3.6 and it seemed to install fine. i can access all the partitions from knoppix without a problem. however, thats not the case for windows. when i go to windows, obviously, the system partition shows up fine. thats not the case for the other two partitions though. they don't show up as a drive. i can see the two partitions under the disk management mmc though. the partitions show up as healthly ntfs partitions and i can even see the name of the partition that i had originally assigned to it. there just isn't a drive letter assigned to the two partitons anymore. i guess what i'm asking, in a sense, is how can i remount my windows partitions? this might not be the right place to ask that question but the question that is appropriate for this thread is what does the knoppix installer do during installation that could have possibly corrupted my windows partition table? oh, btw, i installed lilo to my mbr as my boot manager, but i didn't think that any partition information is saved to the mbr. thanks in advance for anyone that can help me.

**shah** · 10-05-2004, 10:00 AM

Try open qtparted and see if that partition is set to hide.

**majikman** · 10-05-2004, 08:52 PM

you were right, the partitions were hidden under qtparted. however, i'm not sure thats the problem. when i try to unhide, it says that its unhidden. i restart the system, go back to windows, and its still not showing up. so i restart and go back to linux, and its hidden again. i thought this was a problem because i was using the 2.4 kernel and my partitions were ntfs. so i tried it in the 2.6 kernel. i did the same thing as before. this time when i restarted, i couldn't even boot into windows. so now all i got is linux. not bad i guess... but i was hoping to get some windows functionality back.

**firebyrd10** · 10-05-2004, 11:17 PM

Originally Posted by majikman

you were right, the partitions were hidden under qtparted. however, i'm not sure thats the problem. when i try to unhide, it says that its unhidden. i restart the system, go back to windows, and its still not showing up. so i restart and go back to linux, and its hidden again. i thought this was a problem because i was using the 2.4 kernel and my partitions were ntfs. so i tried it in the 2.6 kernel. i did the same thing as before. this time when i restarted, i couldn't even boot into windows. so now all i got is linux. not bad i guess... but i was hoping to get some windows functionality back.

Mkae sure after you unhide you hit commit to save the changes.

**majikman** · 10-06-2004, 12:53 AM

i did commit the changes. any other suggestions?

**shah** · 10-06-2004, 02:47 AM

Try using different partition manager to unhide those partition, ex:
http://www.ranish.com/part/
http://www.sofotex.com/3D-Partition-...oad_L1884.html

If the above doesn't work, try use grub with menu.lst something like this,
EX:
# /boot/grub/menu.lst
#

# options

timeout = 30
default = 1

title = Linux
root = (hd1,0)
kernel = /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb1

title Win98A
unhide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Win98b
unhide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1[/b]