Other Norton Products

[Brian_K]

Assuming all goes well you can make the C: drive the System drive again.

Use a WinPE CD to move

ntldr

ntdetect.com

boot.ini

from the current partition to the OS partition.

Use a partitioning app (maybe not PM) to set the OS partition Active.

[dancingdemon]

So here is the screenshot from Ptedit32. I'll await your prognosis and further instructions. Thanks again!

[Brian_K · Accepted solution]

In slot 2 the partition type is 3C which is PQRP. You will note it is the Active partition (booting files) with Boot 80. I assume this partition should be NTFS. Click in the 3C box, click Set Type, choose 07 (NTFS), OK, Save Changes, Yes. Reboot. Is it OK now?

[dancingdemon]

D drive is back as "new volume". Thank you very much. This entire partition did indeed consist of edited baby/family pictures etc. from my niece's wedding video montage a while back and I may need some of them plus the clip art for the wedding video. 

You saved me a major hassle in trying to locate any copies of these pictures I may have on the other two disconnected drives.

I'll never make this mistake again.

In the future, if I want to reformat and reinstall windows on a drive that is already partitioned, is there something I should do to prevent windows from making the next available drive the system drive?

I had planned on reformatting entire drive and starting fresh after copying all data from my D and H drives, but perhaps moving the boot files to C as suggested earlier would suffice. What will this do to the D drive? Do I still need partitioning software to do something to D after making C boot drive.

I don't mind playing around after copying the data off this drive, but will need to get another drive tomorrow to copy data to.

windows computer management now identifies drives as: C:  NTFS Healthy (Boot)    New vol D  NTFS (system) and

New vol H NTFS healthy.

Finally, for my info, does a corrupt partition table need to be fixed before attempting data recovery? I always felt I'd get most of data back, but envisioned myself at a command prompt copying directories and files and my DOS is not very good anymore.

Thank you both!!

[DaveH]

I can change the "system" (active partition) back and forth between C and D without any other tools by copying those files onto another partition and then using disk management to make that partition active.  After I reboot, the label "system" is changed to the new active partition.

You will need to change your view settings to show all files and to unhide protected system files.

Then copy (don't try to move them) the 3 files listed above from the D partition to C.

Then in disk management, on the bottom section right click on the C partition and select "mark partition as active".

Ignore the warning windows gives you and click OK.

After you reboot disk management should now show C as the system partition.  You can then delete those 3 files from the D drive, or just leave them if you want.

It's also possible that when you copy them from the D drive to the C drive you may find that they already exist.  I'm not sure if XP would have been able to use those files when your partition was set as pqrp.

Dave

[dancingdemon]

The three files were sitting in D:

I copied them to C: Disk management doesn't offer an option when I rt cl drive C to mark partition as active

Should they go in a folder like Windows or System or System 32 - I googled "what folder contains ntldr in XP one of the posts mentions i386 folder. I don't see one in C drive under windows folder or system or system 32. I've seen this folder before, but perhaps I am remembering earlier operating systems.

The three files are in root of C in no folder. Should I reboot and try again to mark C as active in disk management?

[Brian_K]

---

dancingdemon wrote:

The three files are in root of C in no folder.

---

That's correct.

See if you can set the WinXP partition Active from a PM boot disk but don't let PM "fix" anything.

[dancingdemon]

when you say set active using PM boot disk, are those the rescue disks I never made?

Just for laughs, I opened PM and it says drive c status is none and type is logical and drive D status is active and type is primary.

I was looking around some other stuff looking for the i386 folder and it is in a backup or repair folder. I'm at my laptop so I'd have to search for it again, but that reminded me that when I lost drive D over a month ago to Pqrp partition, I tried last known good config and system restore to get partition back.

Do you think this is worth messing with? I can go find some floppies and create the rescue disks- or what do I use for PM boot disk?

[dancingdemon]

I booted to DOS from partition magic install CD, but wasn't sure what to do there.

It would be a great feeling of accomplishment to fix this, but I'm wondering if it would be easier and more logical to go buy an external HDD to back up the 200+ GB of data on the D and H drives, reformat those partitions, delete partitions in disk management making one HDD again, format and sys drive and perform clean install of XP on a new C with the rest of drive unallocated space.

I'm thinking it might be nice to make a system image after I get all the apps reloaded and tested. I eventually want a dual boot with XP for my video editing and windows 7; that is if I can system image a dual boot with two different OS's. I'm not concerned about getting Windows 7 on until after I finish these family wedding projects which are now several years old.

Thanks for all the help again. I'll check forum tomorrow at work - neighbor's barking dog kept me up last night, so I'm going to try and catch a little sleep.

[Brian_K]

As your C: drive is a Logical Volume you are stuck with the current situation. You can't make the C: drive "System" (not without a boot manager).

Accept it. It will work OK.