Problem with accessing a partition

Thanks a lot for your interesting comments and helpful ideas.
I'm sorry to bother you again with my questions, hopefully last time, but
this might lead to a breakthrough.

1. These are strange values. The hidden sector values suggest that the data is nowhere near the boot record. This could indicate how Partition Magic moves data when you resize a partition.

My logical partitions D: and E: are not system partitions. They are so to
say chained within my Extended partition. Can these strange values mean that
the boot record for E: is located just before the beginning of E: and that
these values reflect their relative distance from the beginning of the
Extended partition? Is such a description used for logical partitions?

2. As far as I know each partition has to be contiguous but the volumes in the extended partition can have spare areas between them and don't have to be in ascending order by disk address.

This is a very important info that I was unaware of. Let me return here to
the PM resizing procedure.
To resize my WinXP(* partition located in the following sequence of
partitions: [C: Win98, (* WinXP, D:, E:, Unallocated] by 7GB, PM had to go
through 5 'elementary' steps in the order displayed below:
a. Resize Extended (* by 7GB (taken from Unallocated)
b. Move E: up by 7GB
c. Move D: up by 7GB
d. Resize Extended (* down by 7GB
e. Resize WinXP (* by 7GB
Are these details somehow useful for confirmation of your idea about these
strange values?

3. It is possible to have Win98 and XP on a disk and select the one you want by changing the boot flag using something like FDISK.

You're completely right. One can easily do it, e.g. in the ptedit32.exe, by
changing the flags. 'Boot flags' 00 and 80 stand for not bootable and
bootable, and 'type flags' 0C and 1C stand for FAT32X and Hidden Fat32X
partitions, respectively. PM has also 2 additional utilities (BootDisk) for
activation and/or deactivation of a primary partition. One can easily change
them.

Regards,
Andrew


"Steven Saunderson" wrote:

On Sat, 29 May 2010 13:23:01 -0700, Andrew
wrote:

2. Just to be on a safe side, I performed the suggested by you test. This
time, I restarted the computer from Win98 to DOS and then ran pedit.exe from
a floppy). The results were the same as before.

Thanks for trying.

4. Some data listed in the Boot Record Table for the partition E: in
ptedit.exe seem to me strange, namely
- Hidden Sectors: 117852903
- First Cluster of Root: 141346
These are rather big numbers, whereas for D: they a 63 and 2, respectively.

These are strange values. The hidden sectors value suggests that the
data is nowhere near the boot record. This could indicate how Partition
Magic moves data when you resize a partition.

5. Finally, in my Extended Partition Table, there are 2 non-zero entries in
the Type column: 0B describing my D: partition (I corrected it to 0C) and 05,
which describes an Extended Partition and not the ExtendedX one, which should
have 0F entry, as in the Partition Table at sector 0. I don't understand this
either and I didn't correct it.

The 0x05 is correct. The continuation entries are always 0x05 even when
the extended partition starts with a 0x0F code.

I'm rather lost here because I don't know anything about Partition
Magic. Assume that originally your disk had two primary partitions and
then your extended one with two volumes. When you increased the size of
the second primary partition perhaps PM made space by moving the D:
volume to after the E: volume and changing the links in the extended
partition to suit. It would be easier to move 11GB than 30GB. As far
as I know each partition has to be contiguous but the volumes in the
extended partition can have spare areas between them and don't have to
be in ascending order by disk address.

It's a double-edged sword. PM is very clever in that it can resize
partitions but it might be producing layouts that confuse things like
Win98. It should be possible to determine your disk layout by using
something like Ranish Partition Manager but changing things to help
Win98 might cause problems when you later use PM to resize a partition
or select the other O/S.

Hopefully someone with ideas or knowledge of PM will chip in here. I'm
hesitant to suggest further changes due to the risk of wrecking your
setup.

It is possible to have Win98 and XP on a disk and select the one you
want by changing the boot flag using something like FDISK. This used to
be common in the old days and I still do it on some PCs.

Cheers,
--
Steven
.