Oops I did it again....

KayK said:   < not on-topic at all, but Britney Spears pops in my head as soon as I read the title >

that was the joke....and just like her music now, this is a disaster

skibum43 said:   Why not just restore a backup image? You do have one don't you? You've been in this forum long enough to have heeded the advice offered many times here.

...from last month

lordoffire said:   ...from last monthAssuming you keep your data on a separate drive / partition, then you should have no trouble getting back up and running using a month-old image. Maybe you have to reinstall some programs that weren't installed a month ago, but all of your data is still there on the other drive / partition.

If you don't keep your data on a separate drive, in my humble opinion you should start doing so...

some news...got it to boot into windows again, but it's still restarting after the logo

afaik, it still shows up as raw while trying to check from another computer

I think it has to do with the whole alignment thing, but for whatever reason, I haven't found a way to align a disk that comes up as raw

minidrag said:   lordoffire said:   there ain't no room for two drives in a laptopNo, but that's what USB drives are for.

Now that's it's booting... does the Windows 'repair' option at boot see the drive? If so can you run a System Restore point?

yes it sees it finally, but no the restore option doesn't work....I tried it before and it said it couldn't find any (or something to that effect)

apparently the letters may have been changed around, windows is showing up as being on E: instead of C:....that could easily be the issue

I don't know why but ubuntu and gparted aren't seeing the partitions again....may have to re-check the table again....my current plan was to try to install Acronis on ubuntu, image the disks I could find to an external drive, check them on a different system, clear the drive, then restore the images....I still have not gotten the partitions to show up when I slave the drive; which I'm guessing is at the root of the issue

if you have a suggestion to try and fix it, great

(I don't know if Acronis or a similar program is capable of imaging a "raw" disk, but I'd prefer to have a backup in case I make things worse. I can always copy XP back (it was dual boot) since I seldom used it but there was a lot of stuff on win7 I should have protected.)

ChinaRider said:   lordoffire said:   there ain't no room for two drives in a laptopWhat about two partitions? Got room for that?

in this situation, that really wouldn't have made any difference since it affected the entire drive

minidrag said:   If the drive letters are the issue you may be able to fix things by rebuilding the BCD via that link I posted before.

Do you have a USB drive? If you boot to the Windows Repair screen and go to a command prompt you said you can see your files. If a USB drive is also visible from there you should be able to manually copy your files. A pain, but better than nothing.

(I lol'd)

tried all the options there, but that still didn't do it....I was going to try and use the repair option on the XP64 partition to see if I could at least get that to boot...nada....either it just plain can't see it or the sata driver isn't playing nice

anywho...going to try to use Acronis bootable media to back up everything, then replace XP