Detosx Posted January 20, 2007 Share Posted January 20, 2007 (edited) I tried to boot into my XP and Vista beta partitions and got an error message "autochk program not found - skipping auto check". The bootup then failed. I did a Google search and didn't find anything very helpful, beyond that the partiton in question may be a hidden one (new indeed - I have never experienced not being able to unhide partitions; I tried Gparted, QTParted and Acronis Director and none of them could unhide my partitions, though they said they were doing so; evidentally the partition table was damaged). After a lot of plowing through threads I found one that mentioned Partition Magic. I accept that Partition Magic is inclusively more powerful than the free partition managers I use but... most things you can do in Partition Magic you can do with a combination of QTParted (which comes with the Knoppix Linux Live CD) and Gparted, both of which are free and being regularly updated by the open source community. In this instance, though, it looked as though I was stuffed because, in Gparted's case, as least, I couldn't do what is suggested in the quote below. I have Acronis Disk Director (Acronis OS selector is bundled with it; yes, OS Selector adds a bit to your boot time but it saves a bit of hassle in the setup of a multiboot, something you need a lot of patience to set up to YOUR liking!) What was suggested was:- Split partition so that it is two partitions. After that make one of them active, then add the partition that can't be used to the newly active partition and you will have the partition back. I couldn't get Director to add one partition to another, so I tried something else. I deleted the XP partition with Director and then undeleted it (a disclaimer dialog box popped up advising of data not being retrievable, though in my case it was). Doing so caused the partition table to work; when I set the partitions to unhide they indeed un-hid! Edited January 20, 2007 by Detosx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Detosx Posted January 20, 2007 Author Share Posted January 20, 2007 I decided to do a clean reinstall of XP, having given it quite a battering trying to get it to boot. I got the same autochk message... Damn. Worse, where the fudge I mentioned above worked the first time, the second time it did not. Nothing I tried made the partition table work; the partitions that I had hidden (to avoid their boot record being overwritten/corrupted) would not un-hide. I need to buy Partition Magic 8. I have version 7 but I'm not sure it's possible to patch it to get it to work with newer/large capacity drives? In terms of ease of install and maintenance I will in future use a second hard drive rather than cram three or four operating systems on one drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Detosx Posted January 22, 2007 Author Share Posted January 22, 2007 (edited) I am not a great one for giving up... I found that if I moved all of the data off the storage partitions (I had four storeage partitions in an extended Logical partition) and them deleted that partition, bringing the number of Primary partitions on the hard drive down to three (you can't have more than four primary partitions), I was then able to resize the XP partition to someting smaller, make a new primary partition in the new space next to it, make that parition NTFS (in this case), make that partition 'active'/'boot' and then use the merge partition facility in Acronis Disk Director. Having done so the partition table was repaired, I could unhide partitions and they would stay that way. I now have a working tri-boot XP, Vista Beta and OS X. Edited January 22, 2007 by Detosx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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