Computer Hangs

Well,

I was using the lovely Partition Magic to merge to partitions on my hard drive. The partition with the OS was not touched. PM gave an error stating that one of the partitions could not be locked. So I tried to booting to the XP cd and delete the partition and reallocate the space from there. Well, it didn't like that and said it could not access the hard disk. Now, when I try to boot my pc, it will just hang. Eventually it will go to the oh-so-wonderful blue screen stating, "a problem has been detected and windows and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer". When I try to boot from the CD now, it just goes to a blank screen and there is no activity whatsoever. Yeah, my notebook doesn't have a floppy drive, so I can't go that route either. I tried a boot cd, but it still does the same thing. Oh, and I can't use the utility provided by the manufacturer to return the thing to it's normal state because once you do a clean install, you aren't able to access the utility.

Any ideas...? Don't know why I'm smiling because this really sucks!

Nevermind...Dell is replacing this faulty hard disk.

sounds like the merge of partions has affected your MFT and screwed your entire hardisk. if the partition could not be locked that emans one of the updates to the partition table was not successfuly performed and the system probably cannot determine where one or more of the partitions ends or begins...

Thats probably why the windows Xp disk cannot detect the hd. I think you will need to check the state of your hardisk and accordingly either re-format the disk or try and recover/restore the partition table. there are several ways to this.

The easiest way would be through the use of a Linux Live Cd. do you have any prior experiance with linux ? if you have i would reccomend this route.. post back and let me know.. and i'll guide you through the process as best i can.

If you prefer to stick with a windows/dos method.. let me know and i'll try and help that way...


EDIT: ok never mind just saw your second post

Hey, thanks for the reply. You are correct about one of the updates not being successful. That's exactly what caused the problem in the beginning. I am lucky enough to be under warranty still, but your post may help someone else in the future.

Thanks again.