Heyguys I am new to the forum, but I guess you have to have some problem to at some point to join. Anyhow on my dell dekstop about 2.5 years old I am having some serious booting issues. I created a new partition on my harddrive and then tried to reboot and I think it was trying to reboot from that partition. I have tried windows recovery console and fixmbr and fixboot, and I cannot get my main hard drive partition to boot. Latest thing I have done is I used my XP SP2 reload disk and loaded windows onto my 11 GB empty partition which got windows to boot jsut a whole new one. In "my computer" it shows both hard drives (C: the main harddrive) and (G: one that windows is working from) and I can access the files on C:. I also open up Norton's Partition Magic and it shows drive C: as type NTFS, status active, and Primary. It shows drive G: as type NTFS, status bootable, and as Logical. Any help you guy can give me would be amazing, I just want to boot up with all my files.

Hello Lost3489 Welcome to PCHF

If you were to delete this new partition, would you lose any important information? Is Windows still installed on the old C: partition?

The very first thing I would do is back up all of your important data in the condition your computer is currently in since you know it at least works and you can navigate to all your data. This problem may eventually require a full format, partition wipe, and start from scratch.

I would just delete the new partition you made and leave the space empty, then see if you can boot to your original C: partition. If it ends up working that way, then it was probably something you did when you created your new partition. It is possible when you created the new partition you used some setting to make it the boot partition (which I don't believe since it still says your C: partition is primary which is the one that should boot). I find it odd that your new partition shows as bootable. It should just be a logical drive.

I am thinking that when you created the new partition, your old partition became corrupted and then when you installed Windows on the new partition, it decided to run off that instead.

The easiest thing to do would be save your data, then just dump the whole hard drive and start from scratch. The easiest way to do that is to just put your Windows disk in, boot to it, then when you go to install Windows it asks what partition you want to use. At that point just delete all the partitions, then create your Windows partition and make it the size you want and install Windows. Then when you are in Windows after the install, go to disk management, and take the unallocated space and just do a quick NTFS format on that. That will make it a usable space.

Hope any of that info helps you

yea I think the backup and start from scratch may be it because I have tried deleting the partition and makin it unallocated space and it still doesnt boot my main partition