[haiku-development] Re: Partition table troubles

  • From: Sean Healy <jalopeura@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:24:44 +0000

On 3/23/2011 12:57 PM, Jonas Sundström wrote:

On 2011-03-23 at 11:37:27 [+0100], Sean Healy<jalopeura@xxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
  ...
Recently had to reinstall Windows XP, which of course messed up my boot
sequence. Once i had everything back in place, however, Haiku won't
boot. The Haiku bootloader is still there, but it can't find my Haiku
partition. I can boot into the nightly via vmware.
  ...

If there was any repartitioning of the disk you also need to reinstall the
Haiku BootManager. (It likely only stores offsets into disk to the start
sectors of the partitions that were present at the time of it being
installed, and doesn't know about the partition table having changed.)

I don't think rerunning the BootManager will do anything useful at this stage, assuming it finds partitions the same way DriveSetup does, because DriveSetup sees one big chunk of unallocated space instead of all my partitions.

However, it is possible that there were some changes in the partitioning, even though none wee necessary or intended:

1) Last time I reinstalled Windows, it did not automatically format my partition for me. So during the install, I deleted my Window partition and recreated it. All the details (offset, size, filesystem type) were the same. Presumably the partitioning tool in Windows is not smart enough to see that the end result is the same as the beginning state, so I assume it wrote the "changes" to the partition table. But it shouldn't have touched the other entries, unless it rewrote the entire table to change a single partition. And even if it did, it shouldn't affect offsets.

2) I had to restore my bootloader (XOSL). That also wrote changes to the partition table, because it had to mark the XOSL partition as bootable. Again, there should have been no need to write any more than one byte to the table, but that doesn't mean it didn't.

Any BIOS setting related to disk addressing changed?

Not that I know of.

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