Update: I’ve now managed to actually copy my precious documents off my laptop via numerous trips to and from my laptop and desktop PC. After staying up until 01:30 this morning just to actually get it to boot into Windows, I’m now stuck with an error that says “autochk program not found – skipping AUTOCHECK” and I can’t proceed any further. If you’ve had this before please leave a comments with your solution. Thanks.
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Well, I gave installing Ubuntu 6.06 a go on my laptop around 30 minutes ago and now I believe that all my partitions on my harddrive are now unrecoverable. During the installation I resized my Windows partition minus 8GB (enough to still leave me 15GB of free space for Windows). I told the partition manager to create two new partitions – one ext3 partition of 7GB and one linux-swap partition of 1GB, more than what the instructions asked for. I then proceeded to the next step and it gave me options to mount the root. Unfortunately, the partitions I had just made didn’t show up in the drop down list – only the Windows partition did. So, I went to the previous step and that was when I swallowed my heart. Error symbols and the window showing my NTFS Windows partition was now a FAT16 partition. And that linux-swap partition I had created was now a NTFS file system and the ext3 one was now a FAT16 filesystem. I have to say that I did want to die. This is my damn laptop and I’ve only had it just over a bloody year. I exited the Ubuntu install and restarted the laptop.
Bad PBR
I only assume that is something to do with the boot record. I then fired up the Windows Recovery console, and wrote a new master boot record (MBR) but to no avail. I then fired up the console again and checked if the Windows partition was actually in the boot record. It wasn’t. I’m now running the in-built diagnostics to try and determine the problem but all this time I’ve been writing, it’s at 5%.
Please, please, if you’ve encountered this before, or know someone who has, please help me. Cheers guys. I’ll update when I can – if I can.
