I have two hard disks,one of 40 GB and the other of 200 GB.On the first one I had a 10 GB primary partition and a 30 GB extended one.on the primary partition was installed windows xp.n the extended partition there were two logical drives,one of 20 Gb and the other of 10 GB.I had installed linux on the 10 GB drive,and the 20 GB drive was left for windows applications and stuff.Now accidentally I deleted the 20 GB logical drive and soon after that the disk management utility gave errors.When I rebooted the system,it would'nt boot.So I re-installed windows xp on my 200 GB disk,but from here I cannot see my 40 GB hard disk.I can see it in the BIOS settings though.Pleas help!

Geek,

Partitions are assigned numbers. They are assigned in a particular order. That order is:

Primary #1, primary #2, primary #3, primary #4, etc

Once all the primaries are assigned numbers, then it goes to the first extended partition and numbers the logical partitions it finds there in order. Then the next extended partition, and so forth.

So what happened was that your computer (and most likely LILO or GRUB, the Linux boot loader) was configured to see that 10BG logical partition as being sequentially after the 20BG one. When the 20BG one was removed, the 10BG "slid over" to take its place numerically, and now LILO/BRUG couldn't find the 10BG partition in its previous slot, and died while trying to boot.


Now, with your new XP on your 200GB hard drive, you're saying that you can't see your 40GB hard drive? My thoughts here are that when you installed Windows, you deleted the previous Windows installation (which can be one of the defaults during the install), and Windows doesn't know what to do with your Linux partition, so you're stuck with no drives defined.

Go into control panel, admin tools, computer management, storage, disk management. Does the drive show up there? Does it have your partitions defined? At this point, you may be dead in the water and it would be easier to reinstall eveything on that 40GB drive.

-TS