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

debitcardmayhem

Not sure where your prob really exists, but I had similar problems with Partition Manager about 3 years ago, it may because of the SSD is not reporting its geometry correctly (or perhaps the OS in question is not interpreting it correctly). If you have the manual with the disk see if the geometry is as the fdisk output suggested, I doubt it really
since it reports as 2032mb 63 heads etc. rather than your 4GB . It may be worth while looking at http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page which is often updated for newer versions of hardware and includes Gparted. I will have a look later (just back from hols dinner ready etc). Sorry if this it not helpful but was only suggestion for now,

fwor

That would probably win a prize of some sort in a "most screwed up partition table" competition.

However... It may not be right to assume that fdisk is reporting the disk correctly, because full support for SSD alignment has apparently only been added since Linux kernel 2.6.33 - which is very recent.

Ubuntu Lucid is only on 2.6.32, so if you've not already tried, it might be worth downloading 10.10 - which runs kernel 2.6.35 - to see if it tells a different story?

esuhl

fwor wrote: »

It may not be right to assume that fdisk is reporting the disk correctly, because full support for SSD alignment has apparently only been added since Linux kernel 2.6.33 - which is very recent.

Ahh... good point - I was using a pretty old copy of Slax. I just downloaded the latest version and get a much more re-assuring output from "fdisk -l /dev/sda":

Disk /dev/sda: 4034 MB, 4034838528 bytes
71 heads, 29 sectors/track, 3827 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2059 * 512 = 1054208 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x23e323e3

   Device Boot     Start       End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          2       3818    3928064    7  HPFS/NTFS

Phew! Hopefully that'll be easier to fix... although I can't think how just yet!

esuhl

I went into Windows Setup and tried to "repair" the existing XP installation in the hope that a complete re-installation could be avoided, but the laptop still didn't boot.

I don't think it's going to be possible to boot it without re-partitioning the drive. I understand that you can align a partition without third-party tools by specifying the disk geometry parameters in fdisk, so I'll look into that, re-partition, format and install from scratch, I think.

I might even try to put Arch Linux on instead - having to update antivirus and anti-malware applications is really tedious on such a slow machine...

Thanks again for all your help, everyone!

kabayiri

Sorry for the delay coming back. I can't find my notes of how I fixed my Vista OS, but I do remember it frustrated the hell out of me. At the time, the only solutions people could offer me was to reinstall the OS, which seemed a bit draconian at the time.

Can I suggest trying Crunchbang Linux if the netbook feels underpowered?

It's based on current Ubuntu, but has a lightweight window manager. Try booting it from a usb stick (unetbootlin is useful) and see if you can mount the XP partition clean. If that works, then unmount the XP partition, and use something like gparted on the linux live OS to back the whole partition off to an external drive, then resize the XP install on the ssd.