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manmeram

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dskprobe caused problem

I have two disks A (40GB) and B (160 GB). Upon re-installation of win xp in disk A, i couldn't see the partitions on disk B. I googled and installed dskprobe.exe. It showed me the following partition table for disk B (I had 4 partitions of 10GB each on this and rest empty space). Following some threads, I changed the XX to 07 in the line starting with 000001C0. I could see one partition out of four. I changed the remaining XXs to 07s and my PC doesn't boot whenever I have disk B connected. Could somebody tell me where exactly this has gone wrong and the way out. I have some critical data on disk B.

   000001B0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 01
   000001C0: 01 00 XX 10 7D ED 3D 00 - 00 00 D9 D0 07 00 00 00
   000001D0: 00 00 XX 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
   000001E0: 00 00 XX 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
   000001F0: 00 00 XX 00 00 00 00 00 - 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 AA

   Partition-1 starts at 0x01BE - SYSTEM-ID Byte is at 0x01C2
   Partition-2 starts at 0x01CE - SYSTEM-ID Byte is at 0x01D2
   Partition-3 starts at 0x01DE - SYSTEM-ID Byte is at 0x01E2
   Partition-4 starts at 0x01EE - SYSTEM-ID Byte is at 0x01F2
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arnold
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What type of disk was disk B, dynamic, extended?
Do you have a way to connect disk B as an external HD via USB.
You would likely need to use a disk tool to recover your data/partition setup on drive B. getdataback or a tool that will let you reedit the entries.
I think the 07 might be fine for the first partition, but the others had to have a different designation.
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manmeram

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Yes, windows showed disk B as dynamic disk unreadable at which time I had to 'read' it using dskprobe.

When I connect the disk B externally windows instantly reboots! Hope the data is not beyond redemption!

Help!
I think there is a process you had to follow to import a dynamic disk into your new setup.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245725

You could try using UBCD ultimatebootcd.com to boot the system and then try to access/repair the changes you made on disk B.
Since I can't boot now with disk B connected, this option of importing dynamic hdd is ruled out.

I'll probably try with UBCD and see how it fares.

BTW, there must be a file where that info is written. What is that file and where is it? Is it ascii and editable? I'm asking this because when I boot in linux, I can boot with disk B attached and I even see the first partition.

thanks

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arnold
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Thanks Arnold! I burnt UBCD but was lost in the hundreds of softwares in there. Finally SPFDISK came to my rescue as I made changes to the partition table. I could boot now and recovered my data with ERD commander.