I've been playing "fun with partitions"
and I think I'm in over my head. Can I recover my XP partition and if so how would I go about it?
Situation:
I have two physical disks. On my SATA drive I installed Windows XP. After that, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on an old IDE drive. Next, I installed the first Win7 beta, also on the IDE drive. I then re-installed Ubuntu to repair GRUB.
Up to this point, everything is working fine. Through GRUB I can choose Ubuntu or Windows bootloader, and if I choose Windows, I have the option of Windows 7 or Older Windows (XP).
As you know the WIN7 beta is ending, so I installed WIN7 RC1 in the same spot, erasing the partition I was using for WIN7. In order to do this, I had to physically disconnect the SATA drive to avoid an error I was getting during install. The SATA drive is now reconnected.
At this time I can boot into WIN7 or Ubuntu, but XP is absent. If I physically disconnect the IDE drive, I get a GRUB error (error 22) and am forced to restart. Looking back, I could have predicted an issue with this latest change,
but it's done now. I'm mostly interested in this as a learning experience at this point.
All OS's are 64-bit.
Options, explanations and constructive scoldings are welcome.
Thanks!
[Resolution:] Using the XP install CD, I chose the repair option which takes you to a command line. Typing 'help' displays the list of commands. I chose fixboot which did not seem to affect anything and rebooted. No change. I repeated the repair process, but chose this time fixmbr. I was given warnings that I may lose all data and partitions on the disk, but agreed. Again there was no immediate effect. On reboot, I was greeted with my Windows XP load screen and now I have a working XP partition. Thanks to Patio for a great answer.
