IBM HPA doesn't seem to agree with other primary partitions

[netguardianii]

I'm still shuddering a bit after my little encounter with openSUSE here, so I'll be huddling under Windows for a bit.

JD Hurst's last comment in the forementioned post inspired me to create a seperate partition that solely contains data on my hard drive. Windows, which lives on the active primary partition, already took up whatever space was left by the R&R partition, and since there didn't seem to be any freeware partition managers on Win32, I used Knoppix LiveCD's QTParted (perhaps this thread belongs in the Linux section - I'm not sure) to resize the active partition.

Then I booted to XP and created a second primary partition using Start > Run > compmgmt.msc > Disk Management. I formatted it to NTFS.

Windows boots up fine, but whenever I press the Access IBM button at POST (to access the R&R partition), I get screen that tells me, "No operating system loaded."

Everything appears to return to normal when I delete the newer primary partition - Rescue partition works fine. Does anyone have insight as to what's going on?

Before I forget - I'm using a T43.


EDIT: Never mind. I tried another two times and got it to work at last.

[mephie]

Yep. When you added the new partition, you probably hosed up the Rescue and Recovery boot manager. This is assuming you left the IBM_SERVICE partition at the end of the drive....

Anyway, assuming the MBR is hosed up, this is, fortunately, -really- easy to fix, if you know what you're doing...

What you want to do is find the following two files: bootmgr.bin and bmgr32.exe. They should both be in the \ibmtools\utils folder somewhere.

If they're not already in the same folder, copy bootmgr.bin in to the folder with bmgr32.exe. Drop to a command prompt and run this:

bmgr32 /fbootmgr.bin /m1 /ibm

This'll inject the RnR boot manager back in to the master boot record. Now, for the record, this obviously carries a little bit of danger with it, since you're directly modifying the MBR. But for what it's worth, I've done this many -many- times before w/o any issues.

Let me know how it goes.

[mephie]

Or...

Before you do that...

Try this:

Once you have the partition created and everything set up... find bmgr32.exe and run bmgr32 /refresh and see if that fixes it. If not, try the suggestion above.