Fixing A System Gone South

A big Hi to all the folks and Helpers here,

My name is Milton and thank you for any help you can provide me. I don't know much about area of the problem I am in right now, so I seek help in your expertise.

I have a single disk 200 GB on my desktop containing 3 partitions Boot C: 92.x GB (NTFS)| Backup D: 85.x GB (NTFS) | Recover E: 8.x GB (FAT 32) and this drive was not working properly.

I was doing a regular Virus scan with NOD32, but just before it almost finished the system crashed. It could not boot up after that, so I tried to repair the installation (with the Recovery Disk from the manufacturer in the Recovery Console), but it simply jumped from the frying pan to the fire, as it started deleting my main partition Boot C: So I stopped it, but it was too late it had already deleted the files. So I cleaned up the roll back drive which was not working anymore (ever since I used Acronis to backup my stuff), and installed a new version of XP on it. Now, I tried to recover the files, but I had no second system to help retrieve it and running the recovery software on the same system did not solve my problem as the system continued to crash in every 15 to 20 minutes. Nevertheless, I did manage to save some stuff.

To my dismay my auto-backups had not worked properly so the only good backups of the main drives were from sometime in January and since then the drives had gained data on them - about 6 GB on Boot C: and 20 GB on Backup D: So I tried to install XP on C: and to do that I had to had to wipe out the installation on E. Result of all this was that it could not install on C or on E as the MBR got somehow corrupted in the bargain. Backup D: I was not willing to touch for fear of losing the 62 GB of precious data on that.

Right now I have the system going, but it is only a life boat like situation. In the meantime I have backed up the Backup D: partition, have restored the Boot C: partition and I have a rudimentary installation of XP on the a FAT32 drive 7.79 GB which is also backed up. All backups are on an external drive connected over a USB. I changed the devices in the registry or rather added the installations to the Boot.ini and can choose the installation to boot from Boot C:

My partitions look like as follows in the screen shot: (names and configurations got changed as I eventually managed to install xp on the small E: partition which is now named as System Partition C: )

http://img162.imageshack.us/img162/733/partitonscz4.jpg
I would like to have the configuration as below and perhaps you can advise me the best solution to achieve this:

1. Partition I as the main active or Primary Drive to contain the XP Home and the various applications named - BOOT C:
2. Partition II as the backup drive named - BACKUP D:
3. Partition III named as - STANDBY E: as a standby installation of XP Home which could be used as an emergency if BOOT C: malfunctions.

I have Acronis Disk Director Suite 10, Acronis Home 11 (I have made a combined bootable CD) and Hiren's Boot CD 9.5.

Will gladly answer any questions to clarify the situations. Thank you!

Milton

 

As long as you have your backups saved, your ok.

Just get the hard drive you want to use, and partitioned it into 3 partitions. Make sure your first partition is an active primary, that will get rid of that 7.8mb unallocated partition. If you will be reusing the current hard drive (make sure you do a good scandisk on it first), just merge the 7.8mb partition to the first partition as long as it is an active primary it will let you do it.

Now with true image restore your saved backups in the partition that you want. True image will let you expand/shrink the saved partition to fit the new partition.

Instead of making a bootable windows xp partition on e, just save your c: drive backups there (better use of space), this will prevent the problems of having 2 identical windows xp on the same hard drive. If your c: drive gets corrupted, just restore your saved image backup. You can restore it from windows (if it is functional) or from the bootcd by browsing to the e: drive.

The only tool your missing is a "boot corrector", that is a utility that works great with true image and can fix drive letter/boot,ini problems on windows xp. When you restore windows xp and it doesn't boot, a "boot corrector" will usually fix it. It has saved me a couple of times.

Remember the MBR has nothing to do with restoring your backups, the reason your restore wouldn't work was either the hard drive is corrupted (you need to a chkdsk /f or scandisk to fix that) or drive letter/boot.ini problems. Any system partition that is backup is automatically bootable on any hard drive that you restore it whether you backup the MBR or not.

 

I would just add that the original XP partition was probably not a Logical partition. It is now and it's probably why it won't boot.