DUAL BOOT CRISIS

[GWilkie]

Ok I am in dire need of saving guys. I have to confess I am really embarrassed to be posting here because I have been in the business for 15+ years and never had something I couldn't fix myself or with a white paper or two.....
I installed Win 7 on the secondary partition of my HP laptop (Core I5 great specs...etc...etc..) today. Originally it had XP SP3 installed on it from work, which I can no longer access, and I have CRITICAL data on my XP drive that I can not loose.
I installed 7 by booting from the disc, and choose Disk 1, and the second partition. It installed fine, but killed the XP MBR I assume. When I run EasyBCD and try to add an XP Entry it tells me that there is no valid drive containing XP. It also seems that the XP partition isn't mounted??? Why in the heck would this happen and Please for the love of God someone tell me that we can fix this. Thanks guys.


-GeekInNeed

 

[jote]

HI GW, when you boot from your win7 can you see the xp partition?

 

[GWilkie]

Nope. I can't see or access it. I had to assign it a drive letter as well in Win7. I thought that would fix it, but I was wrong.

 

[whs]

I doubt that has anything to do with the MBR. looks like you lost XP from the bootmgr. Nevertheles, if the XP partition is still there, it should be easy to access it from Win7 and recover the data.

But before we proceed, I suggest you post a picture of your Win7 Disk Management. Then we'll see.

 

[GWilkie]

 

[GWilkie]

Here we go

 

[jote]

Can you run this program, there is an option to search lost partitions.

Free Partition Recovery Software - Recover Deleted FAT/NTFS/Ext2/Ext3 Partition.

 

[jote]

Can you run this program, there is an option to search lost partitions.

Free Partition Recovery Software - Recover Deleted FAT/NTFS/Ext2/Ext3 Partition.

If u find lost partition and you press fix it is posible that mbr changed and windows not boot so you will need to fix the boot again, boot from xp setup cd and chose repair trought xp console, whit commands

fixboot and fix mbr

 

[whs]

Looks like you have Win7 on C and E is wiped out. Was E the XP partition? You must have specified formatting or another installation option when you installed Win7. Else I have no explanation why that partition was cleaned up.

With your level of experience I assume you have an image of the XP partition. If yes, the partition is easy to repopulate. Then you only have to fix the bootmgr.

 

[GWilkie]

This is the part I don't get.... You see here is the original Vs what I have now.

Original:

1 Disk - 2 partitions.
Disk 1 - partition 0 = C: This contained Win XP
Disk 1 - Partition 1 = E: This was empty.

After installing Win 7 I have the following:

Disk 1 partition 0 = NO Letter initially - After reading some I decided to assign it E in the hopes that the boot loader might pick it up. NO luck.
Disk 1 partition 1 = C: now with Win 7.

**Originally my partition with XP did have PGP whole disk encryption on it and was 32 bit, which is why I think it is showing as unrecognized and unmounted... This Win 7 is 64 bit. This is just a guess though.

 

[GWilkie]

And yea I have a clone back up at my office, but I have a flight out in the morning. No idea what possessed me to do this on the night before I fly out.... I normally laugh at people who do this sort of thing and call them rookies.....

 

[whs]

The active partition is always C - and that is Win7 right now. Right now your E shows 100% free space, but I am not sure what role the PGP encryption could play in that.

What do you see when you open the E partition from Win7 ?

 

[GWilkie]

it shows 116MB utilzed, but no files show when I go to look. I came across this error many moons ago when dual booting Win98 and (FAT32) and Win2k (NTFS) This was what one OS would say about the other because they didn't recognize each other.... My main problem is that the tool EasyBCD won't work.... grrrr FML....

 

[hjonesMCT]

Hi GWilkie,

Do you have a folder on the C: drive called Windows.old? HOPEFULLY Win7 left it there for you and you can extract stuff from it.

 

[GWilkie]

That would be great; however, the windows.old directory wouldn't exist on dual boot or clean install which is what I have. Thank you for the post though.

 

[jote]

have you tried the software that i tell you before

 

[whs]

The 116MBs is peanuts for a missing system. Not sure what that is - maybe the residual XP bootmgr. There is a possibility that Win7 may not see any files because of the encryption. But I have no experience with that encryptiom program and what it would do to you. I suggest you persue that encryption path a bit more. But there I cannot help you because I just have no knowledge in that area.

Btw. There will be not Windows.old. You get that only with an upgrade. But you made a clean install.

 

[GWilkie]

I am in that software now. The partition shows just like it did in windows.... Just gotta figure out what step to take next.

 

[whs]

Hmm, that sounds like progress. I would focus on recovering your user data. The XP you can always reinstall - if you still need it.

 

[GWilkie]

OK.... so... PGP whole disk encryption will not let Win7 see anything on the disk. That is why little to no data shows up on the "new" e: that should be/used to be C:

This is also why EasyBCD will not allow me to add Win XP boot loaded because it doesn't see WIN XP anywhere....

Now that I uncovered this.... anybody got an idea?