OS will not reinstall after partition merge

Name: Shannon Louden

I’m the computer genius of the family. I haven’t encountered a problem I couldn’t fix until now.

I have a Toshiba Satellite A200 with a 160gb hard disk drive. I had 2 partitions set up (using partition magic) as I was going to run 2 systems. XP and Vista. I had only installed XP on both, as my vista is un upgrade. I intended to stick with XP as I found all my drivers, and liked the way the system ran. I used partition magic to combine the two partitions, and then restarted, and that’s when problems occurred. The partition magic was successful but upon reboot there was no operating system.

Windows XP disk says inspecting hardware then I get a blank screen.  The vista disc takes forever to install, and when it gets to where I can install it says that it cant create a new partition on the disk, and there may be a problem with the hard drive controller.

Vista and XP are probably hanging as they try to read the hard drive, the partition is messed up to the point that it’s hanging both installs.

Likely when you tried to merge them there was an issue because both partitions that you had setup each had boot sectors, and now there is conflicting information within them.

If your version of partition magic comes with a bootable CD, then I’d suggest booting to it, and deleting all the partitions currently on the hard drive. This will, of course, permanently erase all of the data on the HDD, but I’m sure you’re already aware of that.

If your version of Partition Magic does not have a bootable CD, then you can always boot from an old Windows 98 or ME bootdisk, run FDisk, and delete the non-DOS partition.

After the offending partition is gone I imagine you’ll be able to start the install.

If after all of that you still can’t get it to start, throw in an old hard drive and go from there.