Last week I was off a few days from work as I was feeling under the weather. Truth be told, I’m still feeling like crap but I can’t very well take 2 weeks off work to be sick now can I? Anyway, during one of my sick days, Tamara comes to me and tells me that her computer isn’t working. Thinking it was a simple issue, I wandered down to her office and figured I’d take five minutes to correct whatever issue she was having. Well, that’s not how it turned out.
The error message she was getting was “Invalid Partition Table” when she booted the computer up. Anyone who knows much about setting up computers knows that this is … well… a really bad error to get. I told her flat out that she may have just lost everything that was on her machine. Knowing that it was her work computer, and that she hadn’t backed up in over a month, she was a little worried.
First thing I tried was ERD Commander which I have used before but it wouldn’t even recognize that there was a hard drive in the computer. After doing some research online with my own computer, I found a utility called Paragon Partition Manager. Thankfully I was able to download a copy and use it. Let me tell you, this tool was a life saver.
First off, it saw the partition that had Tamara’s stuff on it and allowed me to copy files from it to a portable drive. Even if I had reinstalled the OS, I would have her data. She was relieved. However, after doing several “repair” attempts, the machine refused to boot into Windows. It was however booting into something else.
Ever heard of Dell Media Direct? I hadn’t. Apparently it’s a mini-OS that gets installed on some Dell machines that allows you to play music and DVD’s without booting your system into Windows. It hides the partition that this mini-OS resides on so it doesn’t show up in Windows. But, when you press the “Home” button on the computer (which Tamara used thinking it would turn the computer on), it changes the partition table slightly to boot this other OS. Since I had wiped the OS clean previously when I installed XP (got rid of Vista), it must have done something really frakked up to the partition table when she pressed that button.
No matter what setting I put on the partitions, Windows would not boot up. So I deleted every partition on her machine except for the one that had Windows, moved that partition to the front of the drive, set it active, rebooted and prayed.
Within a few seconds I saw the lovely XP logo come up and I was a happy camper. So was Tamara. Did another backup of her stuff immediately and she was back to work.
The lesson I learned? Remove all of the useless “crap” partitions that Dell installs on your machines when you install your own OS on it. I figured before I should just leave them since they didn’t affect anything that I could see. I was definitely wrong about that.
