[CrakrJaky]

So here's my situation, I haven't been able to find any help on after numerous searches.

I have an SATA hard drive. First I had 2 partitions both NTFS (each taking up a 1/3 of my hard drive, the 3rd being for my future linux install). I installed ubuntu on the 3rd partition, went thru the install did the auto setup of partitions for the free space I had leftover (the space that WASN'T ntfs)...installed grub not in the MBR. Not in the mbr because I ended up having the problem with "error no os" deal. So I not have my linux up and running, but now I try to get into XP and I get the "don't have hal.dll" deal. Yes I know there's tons of threads up about this, and I've tried to work with them except I'm having a unique experience here. When I do the Windows install cd and go into recovery console and check out my drives with MAP I'm seeing that of my previous 2 partitions on my hard drive that were ntfs (one with windows installed on it), only one is now saying formated ntfs and the other is blank or not recognized. The bad part here is that this is the partition to which windows is installed, so as far as I have seen, I haven't not figured out a way to expand hal.dll or better yet even read my drive. When installing linux I never touched that partition so I'm not quite understanding whats going on here, if it's the mbr or what. Please help! I know everything is still there on the hd but I just want to be able to access it.

Thanks ...Shaina

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Have you tried using cfdisk or fdisk on ubuntu to view your partitions? Windows XP can normally see linux partitions, so this is a bit odd.

[Scooped]

Have you tried using cfdisk or fdisk on ubuntu to view your partitions? Windows XP can normally see linux partitions, so this is a bit odd.

[hal-an-tow]

It sounds to me as if your bootloader failed to install correctly when you installed Linux.

There are a number of these around, the usual one's are GRUB and LILO, a boot loader is installed on the master boot sector of your HDD.

When the bootloader was installed from your Linux distro, it failed to pick up the Windoze partitions.

Hal-an-tow

[CrakrJaky]

I initially tried to install grub on the mbr and then got the error "no os found" so I followed some advice I found on some thread and installed it on the partition that ubuntu is on.

Last night I was playing around and I'm seeing that my partition w/windows on it that is supposed to be NTFS is reporting "primary boot sector invalid" Does this mean something in the partition table is amiss???

From what I've looked at...I've seen people trying fixboot or fixmbr from Windows recovery console, but that might ruin my partition (if it's not already) ...or getting the backup mbr and restoring that. From all that and other threads I haven't found anything that's a good idea.
thanks

Edited by CrakrJaky, 16 August 2005 - 10:09 AM.

[RAz]

using fixboot or fixmbr won't help you recover the data on your second ntfs partition you said you've lost...

did you chose ntfs r/w or r support when you installed linux? if you did then try to mount the patition and see if you can make soemthing out of the info on it...

are you sure you didn't delete it by accident when you configured your linux partitions?

[CrakrJaky]

Thank you for the advice....I actually have NTFS support but could not mount it. There's just something that's screwed up. I tried parition magic also to see if I could copy the partition to another ntfs drive, with no luck in that either. I have resorted to using a data recovery program to retrieve my info (which is really all I care about doing) so now that I have that: backup time. And then I will try again to start from scratch and have still my two ntfs partitions and the third partition for linux.

[RAz]

for linux you need 2 partitions : 1 primary linux partition and 1 linux swap partition(about 256 MB is enough for swap if you have 256 ram or more)

[CrakrJaky]

Yes I'm aware of that, thank you though. I have 1gb of ram so my swap is going to be a bit bigger

[Scooped]

Well check your BIOS to see if it has a MBR lock enabled.

Then I suggest trying to install your bootloader to the MBR again.