Lost partitions (SWAP / EXT3 / FAT32)

Hi guys,

Wonder if anyone has any ideas.

I had a dual boot machine with XP and Ubuntu with grub loaded into the MBR to choose OS.

Booting one day and system kept freezing so I booted off a boot disk (a floppy, yes thety still make them

) and ran fdisk /mbr to remove grub to boot into windows.

When i rebooted i got the hal.dll missing error (which can be caused by the dual booting on the system)

I booted into recovery console and reinstalled windows over the C: partition.

However once booting into Xp i no longer have the EXT3 partition for Ubuntu, the SWAP partition and the shared FAT32 partition.

They dont show in XP, Ubuntu Live CD or Fdisk.

I have booted off the live cd to try and install Grub again but running find /boot/grub/stage1 returns the error 'File not found'

It is currently running a chkdsk /R but i am now at work so cannot check outcome till i get back home later.

Sooooo....... Any ideas?

:

[Edit - Sp]

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Comments

sprkymrk

Wow, I'm sorry I don't have any real advice for you. I did want to help bump your post though in case anyone has an idea but didn't see your post on the first go around.

royal

Ya, that's quite strange. Even if you installed it on C:\, all it would have done is re-wrote the files and placed its boot loader into the boot sector for that active C:\ partition. It shouldn't have done anything to the other partitions unless you chose to let Windows install CD to delete the partitions and use the whole disk to create a new partition that spans the whole disk for the new install.

Sie

All i did was reinstall XP in the C: partition, no formating and XP partition stayed the same size as before.

No do you want to remove this partition, press L to confirm. etc etc.

Guess its time to start again

Thanks guys for your replies though.

blackmage439

It sounds like the partition table got fragged. Is there a possibility of that happening if you remove Grub from the MBR?

Sie

Possibly the thing that confuses me how ever is it never lost the First partition (Windows XP System Files) but lost the other three, EXT3, SWOP and FAT32.

So not all partitions were lost and its wasnt all partiiotns for a certain OS either.

Maybe it just didnt like all the different file types.