Partitions and the HAL...

[Trentham]

I was recently working on a Win2K machine and trying to bring its partitions down to one. It had a primary partition holding W2K and an extended partition.

Using Partition Magic I merged the two partitions but got the rather familar STOP message with W2K declining to boot. I put the extra partition back and all was OK again.

I know this problem occurs with W2K (and I expect WinXP) due to a change in the Hardware Extraction Layer (HAL) but can anyone explain...
1. What exactly is the problem that it's complaining about?
2. How can I merge these partitions without getting this problem?
3. How can I fix the problem once I've got it (short of reinstalling W2K)?

 

[bcastner]

It is nt a HAL issue, but a boot.ini issue, and:

. the RISC address for the boot partition and OS location where not changed, or not changed correctly;

. The critical files needed for boot are not on the same volume as the boot volume;

Start Recovery Console:

bootcfg /rebuild

fixmbr c:

See:

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/q291/9/80.asp&NoWebContent=1

 

[Trentham]

I'll do some experimentation with that but I didn't expect a boot problem since the removed partition was not primary and not bootable.

I would have expected that PartitionMagic would have corrected the MBR so presumably it's just that NT hasn't got the correct partition information any longer.