Safe to remove partition?

I reinstalled windows on my dv2000t the other day and ended up losing my swsetup folder in the process. I started restoring it to its factory state by means of the recovery CDs, but then recovered my swsetup folder, so I cancelled the recovery process about halfway through. I got everything back up and running, but I think the cancelled recovery process screwed up the partitioning for QP. I don't care about quickplay, so I was going to just delete the partition and give its 1gb of space back to C:\

Windows shows C:\ with ~98gb of space and E:\ with 1gb and 0.99gb free. Windows does not show me any files when I browse E:\

I loaded up partition magic and browsed E:\ through pm and it shows the following files:

boot.ini
NTDETECT.COM
ntldr
\RECYCLER
\System Volume Information

That has me a little concerned. I'm hesitant to delete a partition that includes boot.ini. Additionally, PM identifies E:\ as primary and C:\ as logical. When I tell PM to delete E:\, it warns me that I am removing the only primary partition.

I'd rather not have a 1gb partition if it's not necessary, but I won't mess with it if it might cause my machine to fail to boot. What do you think?

 

try looking at the disk thru xp disk manager. You should see the extra partition or unallocated space. I would not worry about re-formatting the .99 drive because I assume you installed xp on drive letter c. That will have your boot sector.

Worse case, if you destory the e drive and lose ability to enter xp (doubt that will happen) just do a new clean install again and create one big partition in the beginning.

Scott

 

Yep, definitely broke something... I can't boot anymore

 

Yeah, this is definitely not good...the xp recovery console won't even load because it can't detect a hard disk...

edit: I never thought it could cause this much harm... knoppix can't even see my hard drive

edit2: I need some sort of bootable partitioning program...or just some kind of bootloader. I got in and was able to see my drive using Dr Dos, but it doesn't allow me to run bootcfg, so I can't do much. Does anyone know of a good bootable program to run?

 

try a reinstall. boot off the xp cd. If you get a message saying that it cannot detect harddrive, you must restart the computer and enter the bios and diable native sata. do reinstall and renter bios and enable native sata again.

good luck

scott

 

In case anyone foolishly repeats my mistake, this is how I recovered:

1. I scoured the internet looking for bootable partition tools. I finally found one that gave me the correct options: I had to set my C: partition to active and primary. I unset my "phantom partition" from primary. I'm not sure what this even was. This was supposedly what I deleted in partition magic earlier.

2. I tried to boot normally and got a ntldr not found error. Of course, I deleted it along with my partition

3. I booted into the recovery console (thanks ScottM - I totally forgot about the SATA issue) and copied ntldr and ntdetect.com from the i386 directory to the root of my C: partition

4. I rebooted and was faced with a missing boot.ini message and then a BSoD. I booted back into the recovery console and ran bootcfg /rebuild

5. I re-enabled native SATA support in the BIOS and booted into windows.

Wow... I think I'm going to stop tinkering for a while.

 

Hi Ross,
NTldr and Boot.ini are needed for any incarnation of NT to load. They must be located in the active primary partition in order for the OS to load. I found this out the hard way on a business network.