!@#$ Error: Missing Operating System!

I have T61 - I have Vista 80 gig HD

Well.. Following the guide I delete the hidden partition. Then I followed the clean install guide and every thing went fine.

When finished, in DisK Management: <unallocate> 6gig, <Primary> 67.xxgig. This is the order I would see it.

I use a utility that moved Primary Partition/C: all the way to the left and expanded the partition from 67 to 7x.gig.

Now the utility requires a reboot. It did and finished a lot faster then it should... well apparently it didnt do anythign and now I have an error.

"MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM"

I blew my hidden partition.

I have my software backed up.

I guess it's back to rebuilding the notebook.

Happy new YEar!!

 

What is your OS? Those don't look like Windows error mesages.

 

OS would not load. It was jsut after the Thinkpad splash screen!

 

Do you have a Vista Installation Disk/Distribution?

 

Could be that it moved the C partition into a logical partition. Windows can only run off Primary partitions. You can always boot off any Windows XP disk and go into recovery mode, I think it can correct this problem, but you will need to lookup the windows recovery commands - you run them through a DOS like command prompt

 

"You can always boot off any Windows XP disk and go into recovery mode"

No with Vista, you can't. You can't repair Vista with XP.

 

A recovery utility won't remove the primary partition back in place, nor can it fix the problem. The OP's OS is shot and it should be reinstalled.

 

Just popped in Vista disk. Doing my drivers now. Oh well. I don't mind really. In Vista setup I deleted my C: and made a new partition that included the unallocated space!

 

Actually it could have been a an overwritten boot block are a problem with the new booting solution. It's always educational to at least try.

Vista's Disk manager has partition extention and retraction built in. I've never been able to extend my c drive into that 6 gigabytes however.

 

Renee,

Yes.. I tried using disk manager but I could only shrink the partition. That is why i use a 3rd party program.

What is the solution to overwritten boot locks?

 

First of all Vista has a repair facility on the distribution disk.

In the past when there were bad boot blocks there were XP utilities like fix boot and writeboot.

 

Exactly what Renee said, XP or Vista doesn't matter.

Just put your disk in the drive and look for a recovery option. Unless they changed it in Vista it requires you to enter commands on the command line. There is a specific set of tools designed to work with Master Boot Records (MBRs), partitions, and boot loaders. You OS is very likely fine, but your partition table is corrupt, your OS is not on a primary partition, your MBR is corrupt or out of place, or it simply could have re-enumerated the physical ID of the drive ie: instead of windows looking in hard disk 0, it is trying hard disk 1.

But since you had nothing on the drive it doesn't really matter, you can just reinstall it and try again - which is a very good reason to do this type of thing before you get the system loaded with important stuff

 

thx for teh help. This gave me another opportunity to a clean install. I spent the better part setting my notebook bo my liking.