"Partition 0 is empty. It cannot be made bootable"

[Deb Suran]

Aaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhh! I've been beating my head against this for days. New used TP31, crippled Windows installation, won't boot, Drive Fitness Test shows it OK. Any time I try to do anything with it after formatting the drive I get an "ntldr is missing" message. So I resort to a low-level format, and then try to use rnrrepair.exe as suggested in another thread to make it bootable and make it possible to access the IBM service partition I've cloned from another drive. Now I get a "Partition 0 is empty. It cannot be made bootable" error. I have tried several re-formats of the primary, active partition. HELP, PLEASE!! This is driving me nuts, and my goddaughter is waiting for her new used laptop. Thanks.

[egibbs]

Deb,

It's hard to tell exactly what you have done, but a few thoughts...

Did you do a full erase of the drive (not just a format) with PC Doctor before you started? In my experience that is the best way to begin fresh.

I assume you are using Partition Magic or something similar - what does it show for partitions on the drive, and what are their types? The Recovery partition should show as type "Compaq Diagnostics" or something similar. The other partition (the one you want to restore Windows to) should be set active.

How did you clone the Recovery Partition, and from what machine type? The Recovery Partition has evolved over the years and I don't believe a partition from, say a T42 would work on a T31.

Can you make Recovery CDs from the machine you are cloning rather than a clone? If so, do a full erase of the T31 drive, set the T31 to boot from CD and try it that way.

Ed Gibbs

[Deb Suran]

Thanks for your help, Ed! It's an A31, I left out the "A" above (sorry). I did a full erase/low-level format of the drive with Drive Fitness Test after testing the drive again to make sure it was OK. Several earlier reformats with Partition Magic had still left a report of almost 10mb of data on the disk, and every time I tried to access the service partition I got an "ntldr is missing" message from a drive that should have been completely empty except for the service partition.

So full erase, re-partition and reformat, cloned the service partition from another A31 HDD (a larger size HDD, so I can't clone the whole drive over). No recovery CD. Both Windows and Partition Magic report both partitions properly, and "healthy" - c:\ is primary and active, service is primary and hidden. I can probably say there's been progress as I no longer get the "ntldr is missing" message. I can try to clone just the smaller "c:\" partition from another drive to the empty "c:\" partition on the one that's giving me such a hard time, that's all I can think of at the moment. I just don't want to end up in another endless "ntldr is missing" loop. Grrrrrrr!

[tselling]

Have you tried unhiding the service partition and making it active? I would also get rid of the empty C: partition and let the service partition create it. I think I once did this quite awhile ago. I use BootItNG to do cloning and fixing drives since its always worked better for me than Partition Magic. They also have a nice Knowledge base for various Windows boot up errors:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/