Display doesn't match actual partition entries

[jburnett4096]

After moving partitions around, the GUI display doesn't match the actual
partition table entries. Therefore the system won't boot correctly.

I started with:

| Sony 7GB | MAIN 40GB | Recovery 10GB | free 100+ GB |

I wanted to get rid of the Sony "rebuild your disk from scratch" partition.
Using the DD CD, I moved the Recovery and MAIN partitions to the end of
the disk and deleted the Sony partition:

| free ------------------------------------- | MAIN | Recovery |

To keep the MAIN partition bootable, it needed to stay Partition #2.
So, I moved the Recovery partition to the front of the disk. Then the
MAIN partition after it:

| Recovery | MAIN | free ---------------------------------------- |

Everything looked fine in the GUI display. But, when I rebooted the
system. It came up in a strange state. After some head scratching
I decided to restore from backup. (Yes I made backup first.) When I
brought up TrueImage, I saw that MAIN was Partition #1 and Recovery
was Partition #2 in the partition table.

I brought up DD and did a Properties on the partitions and sure enough
that's what it said. But there was NO, repeat NO!!!, indication of that
on the GUI display.

You guys should really think about making the parition table entries
match the partition positions shown on the GUI display.

Since I wasn't sure what kind of corruption had been caused by the
funky boot, I trashed all the partitions then restored Recovery then
MAIN from backup and all is well again.

Regards, jsb

[crofttk]

Sounds like you probably trashed your MBR when you deleted the Sony 7 GB partition.

[jburnett4096]

The boot code part of the MBR was OK because it booted into Windows XP. My Recovery partition had only a new install of Win XP on it at the time. The new install of XP came up, but it complained mightily about doing so. What happeded was that the first Partition Table Entry pointed to the MAIN partition making it rdisk(0)partition(1) even though it had a higher starting cylinder number than my Recovery partition which was rdisk(0)partition(2). And, yes, I disabled the Sony PartSeal before I started.

Now that I've thought about it some... MAIN was still the active partition. So NTLDR would have started from there. Since MAIN was supposed to be part(2), that is where boot.ini pointed. So, the Recovery partition booted. Since I hadn't had a chance to prepare it for booting after it was moved, things went down hill from there.

jsb

[crofttk]

-{ Quote: "The boot code part of the MBR was OK because it booted into Windows XP. ..." }-OK, I just didn't realize that from this:-{ Quote: "...But, when I rebooted the
system. It came up in a strange state. ..." }-

[jburnett4096]

I should have been more clear on exactly what happened. I had to think about it for a while before I realized exactly what state the system came up in. At the time, I just trashed everything and kept going.

Regards,
jsb