How badly did I screw myself (dual boot)?

[shantd]

I've got a dual boot setup of Vista on C: and XP on D:, one drive. After doing an XP recovery with Norton Ghost, my XP partition wouldn't boot. It complained of a missing ntldr, so I figured I'd do a system repair with my XP CD. I allowed setup to load and it gave me a list of my drives, C: & D:. Unfortunately, it had been a while since I had done this and I thought that I would simply highlight the D: partition and select a "repair" option, but there was no such option. All I could do is install, delete, or reformat, so I rebooted. I guess by allowing the setup process to go that far my boot configuration data was overwritten. Now I've lost my dual boot menu and can't load Vista either.

What's the damage here? Is there any way to "undo" the setup process I inwittingly initiated and return my boot menu/configuration to the way it was before? Thanks a million in advance,

Shant

[BC_Programmer]

run Vista's repair...

[shantd]

Haven't tried that before. What do I do, just put the Vista disc in and then what? Thanks for the quick response.

[SuperDave]

Just boot with the Vista disc in and it will ask you what you want to do. Select "Repair"

[shantd]

Got the Vista repair thing going. After I select the repair option, a window comes up that's supposed to have my hard drives & windows partitions on them. Nothing appears in that window. It says if nothing appears in the window to load drivers, but dos sees my partitions just fine, and when I run the XP setup it also sees my partitions. So I just click "next", and another menu comes up where I select "startup repair", and a progress bar appears but nothing happens. I've let it run for over half an hour and the blue bar just goes back and forth.

Any ideas? Considering the XP disc can see my drives, is there any way I can fix this using the recovery console via command prompt??

[shantd]

Update:

I think the damage is worse than I thought. I tried to navigate to my C: drive through the Vista boot disk and it flat out can't read anything that's on that drive. It tells me I need to format it. That drive had everything on it. It was partitioned into 3 sections, C: with Vista on it, D: with XP, & E: with hundreds of gigs of backup data. Those partitions are no longer visible, nor any of the data on them. Also, there is a new drive with drive letter X: labeled "Boot", probably created by the XP setup.

How on Earth did this happen!? I never initiated the XP setup! Why did it erase my partition info? Is there any way to get those partitions to read as they were before? If I'm able to dodge this bullet, I *censored* well may start going to church again...please help!

[JJ 3000]

Boot to the vista disk and choose repair. You should see five options. The fifth one down should be command prompt. Do you see it?


Open Comand Prompt. You want to get to the root directory of C here so type in cd\
Now you should just see a standard C prompt. It will look like this: C:\>  Do you see it? Good!

Now, from the C prompt type fixmbr and press enter. The type fixboot and press enter.

[shantd]

Thanks for the help there, I suppose I'll have to try it, but I'm thinking it's a long shot. Let me go give it a try and I'll get back to you. Thanks again friend...btw I was only joking about going back to church. 

[shantd]

Yeah, that was no good because it tells me the c: drive has a non-recognized file system. It goes straight to this new X: volume that the XP setup disc created.

Tell me, is this X: volume (about 30MB) a new partition created onto my C: drive? Or is it possible it's operating out of ram? If it's yet another partition created on that C: drive, that's really not good...

Anyway to get rid of that X: partition? Would that help our situation?

[JJ 3000]

When you boot to the XP CD, what partitions are listed?


At this point you might want to use a utility like this one to recover you data.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[shantd]

When I boot to XP, it sees the drive in 2 partitions, 130gigs each. I have no idea how it came up with that, the drive has 3 partitions, divided 50g, 50g, & 400g. The XP disc apparently can't read them right either, so I decided to disconnect the bad drive and connect a brand new drive which is now the only drive on the system. I began to install Windows XP so that I could get back into windows and then run some partition utilities on the bad drive. Unfortunately, after the installation reaches its first restart, I get an error message "error loading windows". Apparently that X: drive is the culprit and it's still there. Even when I disconnect all the hard drives that X: drive is still there, and I believe it contains boot info that's throwing the system off, preventing me from booting anything. Problem is I can't find any way to get rid of it. I try formatting it, it tells me it's a 'right protected disk'. I try to delete it with the Ghost utilities disc, it tells me that my current windows system is on drive X: and deleting it may mess up my system.

So the question now becomes, where on the system is this partition if it's not on any of the hard drives? Is it in the ram? And, most importantly, how the *censored* to I get rid of it??

[shantd]

Update 2:

Got Vista up and running on the new drive. I had to replace my ram with an older stick. When setup is finished updating, I'll put the newer ram back. So strange...

Now it's just a matter of seeing what these partition utilities can do. I'll start with Acronis, Testdisk (thanks for the referral, JJ 3000), then go from there. If anyone else has a personal favorite utility for partition recovery please let me know.

[JJ 3000]

Even when I disconnect all the hard drives that X: drive is still there,

Do you have a flash drive or any other usb devices plugged into your computer?

[shantd]

I found out that the X: drive only exists in ram, harmless.

I've since recovered the data on the drive, but I was never able to boot it or get Vista startup repair to even read the drive, much less repair it. I now have the unfortunate task of having to reinstall XP and setup the dual boot configuration all over again, and unfortunately I must start with Vista first.

I do have my old partitions, Vista and XP pre-configured for dual boot available to me via ghost. If I simply restored XP and Vista which were backed up when everything was working, would the dual boot menu transfer over succesfully? If so, that seems a helluva lot easier than going through all the steps of bcdedit, installing .net 2.0, etc...

[patio]

An X: drive exists in RAM ? ?

[shantd]

Actually, I had a couple people tell me it's in the ram but let me quote somebody else who really seemed to know what she was talking about. She says that drive X: is allocated to the boot CD.

"Drive X: is not on your PC at all.  Traditionally, this is the drive letter allocated (during boot from CD-ROM), to the contents of the CD-ROM itself: that is why it is "write-protected".  Once you finish running the CD-ROM, drive X: disappears again.  It is not anywhere on your hard disks and does not interfere with any hard-drive setup.  You can forget about drive X: as being a potential problem."

I think I can go with that.

[patio]

If you are using Ghost i would suggest if you are going to re-do your existing dual boot then install each OS to a seperate drive.
In this scenario you use the BIOS to switch between which OS to boot.
The other advantage is your Ghost images will work when you need them.
An image of a dual-boot won't always restore properly.

[shantd]

Wow...that's a great idea. Never heard that suggested before. The only problem I can see, at least as it relates to me, is that I only have 2 drives. If I put an OS on each, I won't have true backup security. Not to mention having to use both drives to backup each other, which means using up double the space. But if I had 3 drives or more, this would absolutely be the best option. Thanks for that. 

I am curious about your last sentence though. Why do you say that? What potential problems have you seen/heard about with restoring a dual boot via ghost?

[patio]

It never worked for ne with a dual-boot setup...period.
When Windows is installed to a drive even if it's a different partition it writes files to the root of C:...
If the bootsector becomes flubbed neither OS will boot in some circumstances...
And a Ghost restore doesn't always fix it.
Just my experience

[patio]

As far as backing up Ghost has to backup to another drive/partition....
So in your case i'd back up XP to the Vista drive...then burn it to CD/DVD and vice versa...

[shantd]

Thanks patio, good to know.

Which files in Vista are responsible for booting? I've got Vista running exactly how I like so I'm not gonna ghost my old Vista backup, I'll keep this one. I did however already ghost XP to the other partition on this drive. All I need to do now is configure the dual boot and I'm thinking if I simply copy the files responsible for booting from my Ghost backup and overwrite the current files, it should work, shouldn't it?

[shantd]

Well, just thought I'd let you all know that, utilizing Ghost v14.0 & VistaBootPro, everything is working again. Better than before in fact, as my Vista OS wasn't working right before all this happened. Now it runs like a dream . I'm actually glad this happened. And I have to stress something which is a pet peeve of mine: everyone should be using Ghost or similar backup/restore program. If you go through your computer life without using Ghost or something like it, you are really missing out. Not only does it save your a$$ in situations like this, but it also completely irradicates the threat of catching a virus. I haven't used an antivirus program in years and my system is clean as a whistle. If you do catch a virus, you simply restore your last backup and presto: every trace of that virus is gauranteed gone. No antivirus software running in the background means you have resources freed up & make no mistake, antivirus solutions use up a lot of resources.  If you've ever found yourself on these forums worried about your system or your data, get Ghost, an extra hard drive, and make life easy on yourself.

I'd just like to extend a final thank you to everyone here who helped me with this, especially patio & jj3000. There's no better man than he who goes out of his way to help a stranger. It's nice to know that people have your back in times like this.

Shant D.

[patio]

Good news indeed shantd and glad to hear you are fixed up ! !

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