Help (Can't summarize please read)

[l15741]

I had a friend get a new pc the other day, however he scrapped the drives from the old one. I took the carcass of the old one and I'm trying to get the thing to work as a extra pc, mostly to be used by my sister who I am supposed to be asking around for a old computer for (about the hardest it's going to work is Winamp AND Opera at the same time .). I have an extra old WD 40 gig in the computer in the living room that is going into the new (old) computer.

I went to prepare it for transplant, and it had a random < 1 gig partition on it called like Hprecover or something (it's from an old HP) and it had already been whiped and taken as small as it would go. I then deleted that partition and the computer restarted (Partition Magic 8 restarted it to "perform maintenance". However as it came back on (came back on fine) windows (Xp Pro) could not find any partition on the 40. PM8 saw it fine, however it no longer had a drive letter. I decided to go ahead and perform the transplant and see what would happen.

So here I am now with the new (old) computer with the old 40, the living room PC with it's 160, however the new (old) computer can't find OS it says and the PC in the living room wont boot. I have tried fixmbr and fixboot in the recovery console in windows xp and neither worked I guess. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Kalin]

Partition Magic can "hide" from Windows partitions it thinks it wouldn't like, look for that feature, I believe it was done by it's boot manager (can't remember how it's called).

 

[l15741]

Sorry about the long delay for the response from me.

Thank you for all the views, nice of people to try and help. Thanks for the tip also, you made me look around a little and I realized that there was something like 500 megs of unallotted space for some reason so I made a new partition on it. This then showed up in Windows under my computer.

Before I believed that windows was not even seeing the drive, so I found the fact that it was showing a partition on that drive interesting. I also thought it made the idea of a hidden partition more likely. I tried to make the old stuff a folder on the new partition, which I knew would not work because the old partition was over 15 gigs and the new one was something like 500 megs; however, I wanted something to read from the new partition. It said something about error 1529 and data mismatch or something and then that the sectors were to big and I should resize them. Again just trying to get them to talk I went under the advanced options to look for sector resizing, and that’s were I noticed that the old partition had somehow lost its letter. I gave it G:, applied the changes and there it was back in my computer.

So your idea got me poking and I managed to get it working, thank you. The data is coping from the old drive to the new drive and maybe the other computer will be ready by the end of this weekend .

Thanks again everyone.

P.S. Happy fathers day to all it applies to. You’re doing one of the most important jobs you can get and you are appreciated.