HDD showing as unformatted

newbie78 · 07-08-2008, 03:25 AM

Hi,
I have an acer laptop with AMD Semron processor. I had it dual boot with Fedora core 5 and win xp. For space problems i decided to delete the linux partition without actually removing formatting the system. It worked all fine the next day and i was able to boot windows from the grub prompt (have been doing this earlier as well).
Then i restarted it and it jus stuck at the loading GRUB didnt even load till grub prompt. Although bios is detecting the hard-disk its jus not booting.
I removed it from the laptop and connected it to my desktop to check if it was fine. Though the disk was found it showed it as a single non-formatted disk. Tried it with several comps but no use. Its showing it as unformatted. Also tried Active partition demo to check for the partitions and there as well it was shown as unformatted blank disk. It also shows up in device manager as healthy/active. It had 2 partitions in Windows and are recognised as one now.

I have important data and dont wanna lose it. Please help.

belfasteddie · 07-08-2008, 11:02 PM

I would suggest you need to FDISK/MBR. This will overwrite the MBR and then Windows will boot . You could also insert your xp disk and go into repair and use the FIXMBR command.

07-08-2008, 03:25 AM	#1 (permalink)
newbie78 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 1 OS: win xp	HDD showing as unformatted Hi, I have an acer laptop with AMD Semron processor. I had it dual boot with Fedora core 5 and win xp. For space problems i decided to delete the linux partition without actually removing formatting the system. It worked all fine the next day and i was able to boot windows from the grub prompt (have been doing this earlier as well). Then i restarted it and it jus stuck at the loading GRUB didnt even load till grub prompt. Although bios is detecting the hard-disk its jus not booting. I removed it from the laptop and connected it to my desktop to check if it was fine. Though the disk was found it showed it as a single non-formatted disk. Tried it with several comps but no use. Its showing it as unformatted. Also tried Active partition demo to check for the partitions and there as well it was shown as unformatted blank disk. It also shows up in device manager as healthy/active. It had 2 partitions in Windows and are recognised as one now. I have important data and dont wanna lose it. Please help.

07-08-2008, 11:02 PM	#2 (permalink)
belfasteddie tech hardware team Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Belfast N.I. Posts: 1,552 OS: Puppy Linux 4.12	Re: HDD showing as unformatted I would suggest you need to FDISK/MBR. This will overwrite the MBR and then Windows will boot . You could also insert your xp disk and go into repair and use the FIXMBR command.