I recently installed Linux slackware 9 on one of my hdd's (Western Digital 120GB 8MB). After a week or so i got bored with it and tryed to install WindowsXP Pro again... The windows setup was unable to create a suitable partition for xp.

So I tried Fdisk, it was also unable to create ANY partition (tryed low-level format several times).

Eventualy Partition Magic 8 was able to create a new NTFS partition and solved several of the partition table problems, but still I can't have windows boot from that drive

I've tried anything I could come up with... anyone any ideas ?

(Tryed Fdisk,PM8,DriveSpace,Defragmentation,Scandisk,WinXP recovery)

All I can think of is that the zero track has been corrupted... perhaps a result of LiLo and WinBoot getting mixed up?

I installed Linux a year ago and enjoyed it for three months. Due to the lack of support by its Office-like apps, I formatted its partition.

I booted to WinXP desktop, ran PM, deleted the ext partition, then formatted it as FAT32.

The partition was restored again without problems.

Look around for Bcwipe, it should be a free download. Part of the package is bcwipepd.exe. Put this program on a dos boot disk and run

bcwipepd i

to determine what disk number your hard disk is (usually 0). Then run

bcwipepd w -d0

and let it run to at least 1%. That should wipe out the mbr and partition table completely. Its brought at least a couple of disks back from the dead for me.

Cheers

Get this nifty FREEWARE:

RANISH PARTITION MANAGER

http://www.ranish.com/part/

READ THE INSTRUCTIONS

USE IT

PROBLEM SOLVED

(please note that Powerquest Partition Manager, in a few occasions, deals with partitions in non-standard ways, so, even if all works with it, double check the settings of the partitions with Ranish's)

jaclaz

Get this nifty FREEWARE:

RANISH PARTITION MANAGER

http://www.ranish.com/part/

Which version works best for you? Do beta versions work fine?

Thanks.

Well, Ranish likes to play it safe, he had for something like one year version 2.38 Beta, then he just renamed it to 2.40 stable.

I have used both 2.40 and 2.43 beta with no problems whatsoever, actually the only (I think) difference, it is the number of partitions:

Version 2.37: can help you have 30 primary partitions but does not

work with disks having a capacity greater than 8GB.

Version 2.40: can work with disks > 8GB but does not support more than

4 primary partitions (this is same as version 2.38 but just the version number

got changed)

Version 2.43: can work with disks > 8GB; also, it can support up to

30 primary partitions.

As I would never want to have more than 4 Primary Partitions, I stay on 2.40.

Never tested 2.44 BETA-BETA-BETA

jaclaz

Thanks for the info.