COmputer Troubles (SOLVED)

[Sam.]

I wouldnt normally do this, but I have seirosuly broken my computer and need the help of peoples in the know. here is my tale of woe:

I paritioned my hard drive to install Ubuntu (Linux). I then restareted my computer and installed linux. All worked lovely, nothing had been erased and I now had two lovely partitions with an OS on each. I decided to boot Windows XP to check that all was in order. It wasnt. It gets stuck in some sort of horrifying loop saying that it is skipping 'AUTOCHECK', my computer then restarts. So, i tried uninstalling linux, and booting again. Same problem. So i install another XP installation on the new paritions, which boots fine, however I now dont have any access to my old partition with all my lovely files and programs on it. I know that they're still there due to checking in disk management but I cant access them or even see them through explorer, please help?


Please?

[strazer]

What tool have you used to partition your hard drive?

I found this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=41769

"autocheck not found - skipping AUTOCHK" and the computer rebooted

To clarify your problem, when you used Partition Magic to set your boot partition, it takes over your MBR as the boot loader & hides your other system partition, which in your case was your Windows partition.

You then installed Ubuntu, which most likely overwrote the MBR with GRUB, which is a linux boot loader. The problem is, GRUB doesn't know how to unhide your Windows partition.

If you do have GRUB as your boot loader, then all you have to do to unhide your Windows partition is to add an “unhide” command before the “root” line in your menu.lst file.

Edit the your menu.lst file by entering the following command into a terminal.

Code: ags

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Example below:

title Windows XP Professional
unhide (hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Try running PartitionMagic (or similar software like a gparted Live-CD) again and see if you can un-hide the missing partitions.