Win 2000 won't boot

[martin yazdzik]

volvoguy wrote:

Dear volvo,
   To see one of the possibilities why the w2k does not boot, you can check
the drive geometry in two progammes and compare it. 
   Try parted.  When it asks you if you want to ignore or cancel, tell it to
cancel, and you will get information that looks a little like:

"Using /dev/hda
Warning: Unable to align partition properly.  This probably means that
another
partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't
have
the correct BIOS geometry.  It is safe to ignore,but ignoring may cause
(fixable) problems with some boot loaders.
Ignore/Cancel? cancel
Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hda is
116280/16/63.  Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 503.999M"


Now, if you do not have fdisk installed, install it, or run knoppix or some
other live distro, and use fdisk -l /dev/hdwhatever(usually hda)

you should get data that looks like:

deblap1:/home/yazdzik# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        3697    29696121    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            3698        7184    28009327+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            7185        7296      899640   82  Linux swap


Now, if you partitioned with parted, which is what the debian/ubuntu
installer does, and your bios was not set to read lba, this is a known
problem. Now, there are many other possible issues, but this is most likely
it.  There is a fix, so do not panic and reformat the hard drive.

Frist, though, let us see the information.


All good wishes,

Yazdzik