Is it possible to have a fault on a hard drive which would prevent it from being bootable but not prevent any problems in use as a data drive?
I've been trying to install windows on my new computer, and it all seems to go OK at first - I can create partitions, format them etc. but when it comes to the first time I have to restart during the install process, it hangs with a message of 'invalid partition table'. I really don't want to have to completely wipe the whole disk, as I've got a FAT32 partition of useful data at the end of the disk that I'd like to keep.
Also I'm failing to get my floppy drive working, so I can't boot off floppy to muck around in fdisk, but I can take the hard drive out and put it in my old machine which has an old version of partition magic.
The closest I've come so far is to use partition magic to set up the disk so it had a large chunk of nothing at the start, then the rest of the drive as an extended partition, within which there are two logical partitions, both FAT32, the last one having my data. WinXP boots of the CD, detects the raw space and lets me create partitions. I choose one for the installation, it formats and starts installation. Then fails on the prompted restart as listed above
Any help most welcome