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HDD Partition Table Error


The Savage

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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?

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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.

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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

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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

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