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dual boot 2000/xp xp doesnt recognize partition

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zanymosquito

Technical User
Feb 24, 2003
8
US
I have a 2000+ athlon on pcchips 810 board. it is setup with dual boot xp pro/2000pro(xandros next...once i get this setup working)

i have 4(5?) partitions on a wd 80gig drive and some unformatted space.

i did some partioning work with partition magic in boot mode now my xp install is not recognizing my fat32 partion as having data on it. when i go back to 2000 everything is wonderful and all data is intact. xp is saying this is unformatted space and doesnt even show the lable that i have assigned to this partition.

any ideas on how to make xp recognize this drive?

any help will be greatly appreciated
 
If this is purely a data partition, I'd suggest backing the data up elsewhere and then using XP's disk management to reformat the partition (delete & recreate it if necessary), then copy it back (and hope 2k can now access the partition - but that should be no problem).
 
an update

just out of curiosity i decided i wanted to see what would happen if i ran partition magic under windows xp and when i went to log into xp...it gave me a checkdisk screen..for partition//?{big long string....} then gave me a cross-linked error of some sorts? then it truncated and rebuilt the files....and surprise! they are the files on my f: partition that windows xp refuses to recognize.

so.....from windows xp i ran partition magic 8.0...and sure enough the f: partition is there...all 38 gig of data and the label i have assigned to it.

i would back up all my data to another partition if i had enough space on the drive...but i dont.

as this is a fat32 partition i am thinking of using partition magic to convert it to ntfs...but dont windows 2000 and windows xp use different versions of ntfs? i am also more than a little reluctant to try to convert it as i have had pm crash on me before and destroy the whole drive.

maybe it would be better to reinstall windows xp as i dont even really have it customized to much yet?

suggestions appreciated!

thanks in advance!
 
I would say one thing - use PM as sparingly as possible. It is a good tool - BUT it can cause problems. As far as possible work out your partitioning strategy BEFORE you start installing operating system. And use native partitioning tools to create and format partitions as far as possible (eg, disk managemnent in 2k/XP, or their install partitioning tools). If after some time you find you need to reorganise - ok, PM great then. Also, if you have a spare hard drive/PC, try having a long 'play' with PM - it might give you an idea of the sort of operations which might cause problems.

Did you know 2k/xp have their own utility to convert fat32 to xp (run convert /? at a command prompt to see how).

2k/xp do have different versions of ntfs, but it only matters when booting (ie, both o/s can read/write to both types of ntfs).
 
I have found out the hard way that pm can cause problems....like a buffer underrun error and total crash.

i am a little concerned about converting this partition to ntfs using the windows convert tool...just because i have never used it before. would someone clue me in as to how reliable it is?

thanks
 
Well I've used it on a number of occasions - no problems. Also, I've never seen a post relating to problems with it. And several other experienced posters here endorse this position. But, of course it is a risk - but a reaonable one I think (one problem for you is lack of space to back up partition - always recommended). The only reservation I might have is if you created the partition with PM originally (but if its had chkdsk run against it, should be ok).
 
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