Boot problem (MBR?) after partition alignment on XP netbook

esuhl

I noticed that the "Paragon Alignment Tool" was on the GiveAwayOfTheDay website the other day, and thought I'd use it to re-align the partitions on the SSD of my Asus EEE 901 (running XP). Unfortunately, once it had finished, the netbook rebooted and displayed the message "Error loading operating system". :eek:

I went into the Recovery Console and used "fixmbr" and "fixboot" (in case the boot partition or MBR had become corrupt), but that didn't help. I booted from a "live" CD of Windows (created using BartPE), and found that I could browse the contents of both SSD drives, and chkdsk found no errors. So the files are still there and readable... I just can't get the netbook to boot...

The Paragon instruction manual suggests booting from the Linux boot disk supplied with the Alignment Tool... Unfortunately it doesn't look like this was included with the free give-away.

Has anyone else had this problem? And can anyone think of a way to fix this?

Thanks in advance :-)

DatabaseError

I also downloaded that app, but checked the alignment of my drive before using it..and discovered i had no use for it...thankfully

All I can suggest is burn a copy of hirens boot cd if there's not a tool to fix it on there, then...er....i guess you're stuck

JJ_Egan

If the fixmbr has failed i find the next step is a windows install . use windows live cd to copy off your required data .

jje

jbreckmckye

I assume you have damaged your bootloader. You could try installing GRUB as a new one, specifying Win XP as the primary OS (to be booted via chainloader).

esuhl

DatabaseError wrote: »

All I can suggest is burn a copy of hirens boot cd if there's not a tool to fix it on there, then...er....i guess you're stuck

Wow! That's a lot of tools on one CD! I booted it and tried the "Boot from Hard Drive - Windows XP (NTLDR)" option (listed under "PLoP Boot Manager")... and my XP installation boots correctly! This option issues the commands below... Is there a way to copy these to the hard drive so the netbook will use them to boot in future...?

find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /ntldr
map () (hd0)
map (hd0) ()
map --rehook
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /ntldr
chainloader /ntldr
savedefault --wait=2

I tried all the options to "Fix 'NTLDR is Missing'". Even though this isn't the error I get - I thought re-creating the bootloader might help... but alas not. BootFix didn't do anything either. I've looked at a few of the other MBR tools, but I don't know where to begin - some of the programs are a bit confusing! I noticed that the LBA flag isn't set (although the drive is only about 3.8GB)... Is that likely to be a problem?

JJ_Egan wrote: »

If the fixmbr has failed i find the next step is a windows install . use windows live cd to copy off your required data .

I don't have any data that aren't backed up, but I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to install and configure everything again. Particularly since the files are there and unharmed. Argh! It's so frustrating!

jbreckmckye wrote: »

I assume you have damaged your bootloader. You could try installing GRUB as a new one, specifying Win XP as the primary OS (to be booted via chainloader).

Hmmm... Is there a way to re-install the XP bootloader instead? If fixboot and fixmbr should have done this... why would they fail? Wouldn't the same issue prevent GRUB from being installed? And how would I install GRUB anyway - I've only done that as part of a (auto-prompting) Linux installation before...? (Sorry - so many questions!)

spud17

This is pushing my limits, way out of my comfort zone, but, have you a standalone GParted 'live' disk?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted/gparted-0.6.4/

Burn the .iso, and boot and see if the partition is still flagged 'boot'.

It can be reset from the GParted disk.

p.s. if the above is wrong, then the disk is still a useful tool to have around.

fwor

Have you tried the Super GRUB Boot Disc? I've used a couple of times - once when I did something daft and broke GRUB and once when a Windows installation disc changed my MBR without me asking it to.

Worked fine both times, though the user interface is a bit odd. Note that you shouldn't use it if you have GRUB 2 installed, as I don't think they have yet updated it to handle that.

esuhl

spud17 wrote: »

This is pushing my limits, way out of my comfort zone, but, have you a standalone GParted 'live' disk?

I ran GParted off Hiren's Boot CD and the partition shows as active...

fwor wrote: »

Have you tried the Super GRUB Boot Disc?

Unfortunately none of the options to fix the bootloader or activate the partition helped. I tried installing GRUB but got "Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition".

I used the PLoP boot loader (from Hiren's CD) to boot into my installation of XP and tried to install the Paragon Boot Manager, but it said it couldn't read the hard disk. So... I downloaded a standalone PLoP CD and installed it. I booted the netbook and the PLoP boot manager appeared! Unfortunately I couldn't get it to boot into Windows, and couldn't find anywhere to enter the boot commands that Hiren's PLoP uses...

Thanks for everyone's help, though! I know this is fixable, so I'll probably keep looking for boot tools to try for another day or so, and admit defeat if I can't get anywhere by then. I just hope I can re-install an OS without similar problems!

spud17

Quote:
Originally Posted by spud17
This is pushing my limits, way out of my comfort zone, but, have you a standalone GParted 'live' disk?

I ran GParted off Hiren's Boot CD and the partition shows as active...

Doing this from memory, but not sure if that's the same as having 'boot' in the rhs 'flag' column.

kabayiri

Run 'fdisk -l' if you boot from a linux live cd, or it's equivalent (i dont run it in windows).

Check that the block sectors are contiguous for the partitions. Perhaps post the output here.

I think you might see a gap between the end of one partition and the start of the next. I seem to remember this confusing the ntldr on my Vista OS on one of my laptops.
There are articles about partition alignment related to ssd specifically on the 'net.

Causes are all conjecture at the moment, since we don't know whats going on with your setup.

esuhl

spud17 wrote: »

I ran GParted off Hiren's Boot CD and the partition shows as active...

Doing this from memory, but not sure if that's the same as having 'boot' in the rhs 'flag' column.

D'oh! You're quite right - I didn't mean the "partition shows as active"; I actually meant "the boot flag is set". Oops!

Interestingly GParted shows a 2.00MiB unallocated block before the XP partition, and 9.92MiB after it... When I installed XP I would have tried to set the partition to the maximum possible size.

kabayiri wrote: »

Run 'fdisk -l' if you boot from a linux live cd, or it's equivalent (i dont run it in windows).

Check that the block sectors are contiguous for the partitions. Perhaps post the output here.

Oh, blimey! The output seems to suggest some nightmarish partition mash-up... Does the (carefully re-typed) output below make any sense to you?! I've never had to play around with drives/partitions at such a low level - I'm used to the OS doing all the hard work! (BTW, the disk is supposedly a 4GB SSD with a single partition):

Disk /dev/sda: 2032 MB, 2032664576 bytes
63 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1016 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3906 * 512 = 1999872 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   ?      199216      491461   570754815+  72  Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(357, 116, 40) logical=(199215, 34, 11)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(357, 32, 45) logical=(491460, 44, 51)
Partition 1 does not end on a cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2   ?       43188      538843   968014120   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(288, 115, 43) logical=(43187, 17, 47)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(367, 114, 50) logical=(538842, 14, 42)
Partition 2 does not end on a cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3   ?      478721      974376   968014096   79  Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(366, 32, 33) logical=(478720, 18, 30)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(357, 32, 43) logical=(974375, 14, 39)
Partition 3 does not end on a cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4   ?           1      931190  1818613248    d  Unknown
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(372, 97, 50) logical=(0, 0, 1)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(0, 10, 0) logical=(931189, 36, 30)
Partition 4 does not end on a cylinder boundary.