less than 200 MB free.
Anyway, the space on "E" we didn’t need, so I decided to make "J" bigger by taking all but 5 GB of the free space
on "E" and adding it to "J".
I used Partition Magic to move the free space at the top end of "E" to the beginning, which made it contiguous to the
top end of "J", which, as I said, was right at the 1024 cylinder boundary (Partition Magic marks the boundary).
Moving the free space went fine,no problems at all.
I then used Partition Magic to add the free space at the bottom of "E" to the top of "J", and this is where everything hit the fan.
A warning showed up in PM about crossing the 1024 cylinder boundary, but I didn’t think it applied because all I was doing
was adding free space. Naturally, I was wrong – shouldn’t have done it!!!
So, the status of the machine now is this:
(1) the space was moved
(2) the machine comes up in dual-boot mode (as it always has) and asks which OS to start
(3) DOS runs fine, but, of course, sees only the 2 GB "C" drive
(4) If I select booting WIN 2K, it starts normally, at least at first, but then asks to check each drive for errors.
If I let the drive check proceed, it checks each drive and finds no errors. Then the system pops up the blue screen
of death with some message at the top that’s too quick to read (but I did figure it out – see below…), and then
the system re-boots. It just keeps on doing this, and it does the same thing whether or not I allow the disk check
to proceed.
Question is, WHAT TO DO???? I’m ready to make the machine into a boat anchor, but I really need what’s on it. I’m not
concerned about losing applications, and I’m willing to reformat the drive and start from scratch, but we must get the data
back (mostly photos not yet backed up to CD).
(5) Booting from another device? Seems like a good idea – but it doesn’t work! Even if I enter the BIOS at power-up and change
the order of the boot devices, trying to boot from a CD drive, it will not boot! For example, if I insert the Win 2K steup disk
in the CD drive, it still boots from the hard drive. The system does boot from a 3.5" floppy, and I’vedone that several times
using Win 98 and Win ME boot floppies. But they start the system in DOS, not Windows, and it seems like there’s no where to go to
retrieve the hard disk data.
