PC Just died - Help needed

Morning,

My system is a Shuttle XPC SB83G5, Intel P4 530J, 512MB Ram, Maxtor 200 GB S-ATA, OS= Windows 2000.

All was running fine, I had a second hard drive attached to copy some files over so I left the room for a while. When I returned the PC had reset itself and hadn't got past the BIOS portion of the boot, displaying the "Error loading operating system" message!!

The drive is formatted in NTFS so I can't access it from a DOS prompt using WinME boot disk I have. I've booted from the Win2K install CD to get to the repair console but that can't list the contents of my hard drive either.

Before I got an FDISK/Reformat the drive (200Gb takes forever!!!) can someone suggest somthing I've missed.

The drive is a single 200 Gb partition, an error I won't repeat a second time!

Thanks,

DC

Boot with the Win2k CD again only this time select to install Windows instead of repair. After it detects the previos version of Windows, then select a repair install. It will reinstall of the Windows files while leaving all of your data and installed programs alone and still working.

Whoops! I got impatient and repartitioned, reformatted and reinstalled.

Not to worry, the install was only 5 days old and I';ve still got all the data (bar teh last 5 days worth) stored on a 2nd HD.

Next time I'll use the method you've suggested.

The issue that I have now is that I used FDisk to create 3 partitions. One 100 Gb and 2 x 50Gb. I formatted all three and then installed Win2K. Win 2K could only see 1 x 50Gb and 1 x 100 Gb. What should I use to recover/format the 3rd partition?

Thanks

DC.

You should not use FDISK with Windows XP/2000. You are limited to 32 GB partitions using FAT32 (FDISK). You can create all your partitions during the install of W2K/XP and you must use NTFS for partitions larger than 32 GB's.

Good luck! :D

Okay, howcome I currently have a 50 and a 100 Gb Fat32 partitions working with Win2K?

What can I do to get the final 50 Gb partition to appear (I'm not refomatting again!!!)

From this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q154997/

Quote:

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FAT32 Features

FAT32 provides the following enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT file system: • FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size.

NOTE: Microsoft Windows 2000 only supports FAT32 partitions up to a size of 32 GB.

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How strange, cos it's clearly not the case here.

Ah well, I've used Partition Magic to make use of the remaning 50Gb and I'll use it to convert the other partitions to NTFS.

Windows 2000/XP fully supports FAT32 partitions greater than 32gb. It's just that Microsoft would prefer that you use NTFS rather than FAT32. You can create and format partitions greater than 32gb using fdisk or some other partitoning tool other than what's provided by Win2k/XP. Actually, you are only prohibited from formatting a FAT32 partition greater than 32gb in Win2k/XP, so you can create it in Win2k if necessary, and then format it using a boot disk.