Help! Screwed up partitioning attempt

[Bob Sinclar]

I have XP Pro installed on my pc as my main OS. I needed to install Win 98se as my Pinnacle DC10+ capture card has no XP drivers yet.

So I bought Partition Magic 7 and created a 10 Gb logical F: drive which was formatted to FAT32 where I planned to install Win 98.

This is where the problems began...

As I began installing Win 98, it told me that a non-msdos OS had been detected and gave me the option to delete or leave alone.
Assuming that this was my XP installation on the original partition I left it alone, and so the 98 installation continued.

After scanning the disk, it gave me an error msg that 98 could not be installed. After trying the installation procedure again and again, I gave up.

So I thought I would carry on with XP...

As the damn thing had set up my F: as my active partition there is no way I can access my XP installation. Me being the idiot that I am, also didn't create any emergency boot disks like PM 7 suggested.

So now, I tried FDISK to delete the active partition...didn't work.

How can i set my XP partition as my active one so I can boot back into it.

Please guys, I don't want to format cos all my Uni work is on there and cannot afford to lose it.

 

[Lonman]

Do a repair XP installation then back-up what you have to. Then I'd advise starting over... it's hard to say what 98 messed up. If you still want to dual boot, install 98 first on the primary partition and then XP on an extended partition.

 

[Bob Sinclar]

I tried to reinstall XP onto the new partition...

It copies the i386 folder, reboots and i get msg "Missing Operating System"

 

[Lonman]

geez, you really been buggering it up. You need to do a repair installation on your existing XP installation... I don't know what will happen now that you've tried to install it on a different one. Try using fdisk again to SET the active partition first... don't delete anything, there's a set active partition option... you might have to 'unset' it on that 98 partition first. Then do the repair on your first XP installation.

edit: not riding you man, it just gets really hard to sort some of this stuff out when you mess with the 'natural' order of disk partioning... been there, done that.

 

[Shover Bot]

I ran into a similar problem when I was dual booting 98/linux. 98 just does NOT like to be the second OS installed.