digiSal.com Forums About Nothing

For some reason my HotSync manager for my Palms is not detecting COM1 anymore. It tells me that it will wait til its open. The only thing i have done different since this quit working is install the other hard drive.

wasnt up to messing with the pC last nite so i let it go...

Last nite I installed an 80 gig hard drive on my system. I spilt it in half. It ended up as about 37gig and 38gig split. I used the partitioning disk that came with the Maxtor drive.

I then booted up a utility disc that i have to see if i can use its partitioning software to squeeze out my remaining space. I discovered a utility called BootMagic from PowerQuest on it. This util will allow you to Boot operating systems that reside on the disc. It saw my XP and Linux OSes, as well as my other partitions. Since i never fixed my bootloader for Linux it has been a long time since i booted into it so i decided to boot it. Upon reboot nothing booted. I went back into BootMagic and it had tried to make one of my new partitions bootable and it hid my XP part. There are no other options in this bootable ap but which partition you want to boot. Once I told it to boot XP everything seemed to be fine. Until I noticed that now i could not see my Data partition with 10 gigs of Data from XP! I did a search on the internet and i read that you cant hide partitions but with Partition Magic. I tried and upon starting Partition Magic, the bootable version, it was telling me my sectors are wrong, or something like that. So it wouldnt go.

I then booted Knoppix to try and copy my files over from my hidden partition. I was able to see this partition but i couldnt write to my new partitions. It looked like they were read only when looking at the properties. Once i changed that i was still not able to copy into them. THEN i booted into ERD Commander and was able to see my files and i was able to copy them over. So now I could access all my files from XP again, but that partition was still not viewable.

So I pondered.

I booted into Madboot and went to Dos. MadBoot has GDISK built into it. I did a gdisk /? and saw that it has a hide and unhide feature. GDISK also told me that my MBRs are overlapping? WTF does that mean? I told GDISK to unhide my hidden partition. Like so.

gdisk 1 /-hide /p:6

that tells it which fixed disk and which partion number.

Booted back into XP and there it was!

I had also noticed that the new parition was made Active by Bootmagic. With GDISK i made it inactive.

Now i need to find out about this MBR problem before i try and fix it.

Questions? COmments? Concerns?

I really can't say why I took the site down. In many cases it just wasn't going anywhere and it probably still won't be going anywhere. I am putting it back online because I miss it. I miss just ranting and having a place to put things that are on my mind or things that I find. I have been wanting to put it back online for sometime but time was not on my side. The time factor has also affected my frequenting of other forums which I enjoy reading and posting at.  Some of the forum posts were lost during an accidental deletion but I doubt that anyone but me will notice. There are a few changes to the site. I am now using a web portal called Enigma which has capabilites for Article, FAQ, Downloads, and Links management. Whether they will be used is yet to be seen. Articles can be submitted to me and I can choose whether or not they will be displayed.

So if you are reading this. Hello.  8)