After trying to re-partition my Hard Drive with Noton Magick I can no longer boot my PC. How do I fix this ?

Question

I have a Dell L400 laptop. I successfully partioned an E drive that had Windows XP and a C drive that had Windows 2000 Pro. I then tried to merge the drives with Norton's Partition Magick (please note I am an idiot and did not make an emergency diskette as suggested by Norton) since I no longer needed or wanted Windows 2000 Pro. When I re-booted there were 2 Operating systems to choose from (both said Windows default), but when you selected either of them you got error messages. One message was a hal.dll error and the other was a boot partion error.

I tried to boot from the CD-Rom drive with a Windows XP disc in the CD-Rom drive. It said to press any key to continue, but nothing happens. At this time I do not care if I lost everything that was previously on my hard drive, I just want to be able to use the lap top with Windows XP. Please note I have the full Windows XP CD-Rom (not the upgrade version).

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

You can use the Microsoft Windows XP Setup program or the Fdisk and Format tools to partition and format System and startup partitions.For additional information about how to use Fdisk and Format to partition and format your hard disk, visit http://fixit.in/transferdata.html

Answer 2

Norton (spelled with an r) Partition Magick is a notorious piece of crap, which is one of the reasons they have you make a rescue disc. If you have two separate drives you don't need partition magick. If they are on the same drive, and you formatted them properly, Windows will ask you which OS to boot to, and you don't need partition magick.

You are most likely facing a re-format and reload of the drives. I know there are decent boot managers out there but I don't use them. My main system has Win XP Pro, Ubuntu and win 2000 server (2003 on a different drive). Unless I mis-understood your question: you don't need partition magick

Answer 3

There are some neat issues that have been further to Vista yet in no way properly truthfully worth the difficulty of partitioning your no longer easypersistent for. Vista is a source hog so there's a sturdy threat that throughout case your laptop is around a 12 months previous its going to squeak via at terrific. XP will artwork advantageous for now. i'm on a Vista gadget and there are some issues that I choose I had my XP gadget returned for. do no longer forget that the corporate international has no longer even theory approximately changing yet, XP is a sturdy and good OS, no longer somewhat as sturdy as Apple even nonetheless it works.

Answer 4

Hi

OK , try this , go into the bios of the laptop and reset ALL setting back to normal and try too boot with the xp cd . Now if that dosent work then , try this , take out the HD and plug it backk in . then last thing will be to create a separte boot disk for the xp you have. Now try to download winternal erd commander 2005 i think they have it viea torrent . please write me and let me know how it go ok

Answer 5

you did 2 wrong things I think
you deleted, or corrupted the boot manager
You used anything that was made my Norton,s

Answer 6

Go here: http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm

Burn it to a floppy or CD, boot from it, and bam everything's gone.

Answer 7

my god u buggered it good i think lol ... try one of the free 98 or me bootdisk isos and burn it to a cd .. that should let u run fdisk and nuke the drive ...

http://www.allbootdisks.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=selectfolder&filecatid=88

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