Logical partition bootable

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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don531
Posts: 1
Joined: 08 Sep 2012, 16:18

Logical partition bootable

#1 Post by don531 »

Help. I think that I really screwed up and need to fix it now.

I needed to make my machine capable of dual booting between XP 32-bit and XP-64 bit. I used gparted to modify my partitions creating a new logical partition for the XP 64-bit. Unfortunately, I thought that I had to make this new partition bootable. After doing this, I could not boot the machine it would flash up asking for which OS then quickly change to say it couldn't boot.

I tied to go back into gparted to see if I could see a problem and it shows the disk is unallocated. I ran testdisk and when I did the analyze saw the following:

TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sda = 320 GB / 298 GiB - CHS 38913 255 63
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors

1 P Dell Utility 0 1 1 10 254 63 176652
2 * HPFS - NTFS 11 0 1 11815 173 6 189642165 [OS]
3 E extended LBA 11815 173 7 37637 254 63 414835590
4 P Sys=DD 37313 0 1 37637 254 63 5221125
Space Conflict between the following two partitions
3 E extended LBA 11815 173 7 37637 254 63 414835590
4 P Sys= DD 37313 0 1 37637 254 63 5221125
X extended 11815 173 8 37312 57 57 409602047
Logical Partition must not be bootable
5 L HPFS - NTFS 11815 205 39 37312 57 57 409600000 [WinXp64]

As I said, I made the WinXp64 partition bootable (my bad), I would appreciated if you could tell me if there were any other errors I made. I bascially reduced the size of the OS partition by 2000000 and made that the size of the WinXp64 partition. Should it also have been NTFS?

Thanks in advance for your help. I really appreciate it.

Don

Lito
Posts: 83
Joined: 08 Sep 2012, 06:58

Re: Logical partition bootable

#2 Post by Lito »

TestDisk is pointing to where the main problem is.
The logical partition must not be bootable.
Besides Windows always boots from the first HDD (Drive 0).
To make it boot alongsisde other system you probably need some software to manage the booting process,
something like Acronis or a Boot Manager like the one that used to be included in Partition Magic.
With enough RAM you could run Windows XP in a virtual machine, with WIndows 7 or 8, as the host.
Virtual Box is free to download and easy enough to run.

Sorry I cannot give advise about TestDisk, I am not up to speed on it.

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