Messed Up Boot Camp And My HDD...

Hi, I am new to Mac's, though do have some experience with Linux...
I have tried to use BootCamp to install WinXP and by accident while selecting partition to install WinXP during its installition time I got distructed and deleted wrong partition...
I am still able to boot Leopard but I can now see 3 partitions:
The first question "what have I messed up?"
The second question "how do I rejoin the partitions without loosing data?"
Third question "did I delete file allocation table?"

Though the Leopard boots it now takes a while for the gray screen to go away and bring Leopard log in window...

Please help

Many thanks

Serge

student said:

The first question "what have I messed up?"
The second question "how do I rejoin the partitions without loosing data?"
Third question "did I delete file allocation table?"

Click to expand...

1.) I am not sure what exactly happened during your installation from just reading your post, but when you deleted the partition, you have to reformat it to FAT32 or NTFS from the windows install screens before being able to install windows on it. So, you might have just deleted it, and then not formatted, so it has no format, but only free space on the HD that cannot be read from OS X. Just my 2 cents.
2.) To get everything back to normal you need to boot into OS X and then open the bootcamp assistant and click the option that allows you to format for a windows installation. Then you need to chose the option to restore your hard drive.
3.) As answer 1.) says, yes you may have deleted your FAT32 partition without succeeding to format it correctly. Once you do the steps in two, you can try everything again by going to bootcamp and following the instructions to get your HD ready to install windows again.

Hope that helps.

Hi,
Well I cant use bootcamp anymore, it keeps saying that I need to fix the hard disk before I can use it. So if I could do it with bootcamp I would but the options are limited. I can use diskutil with partition joining comand but I am not sure weather I can join disk0s1 with disk0s3 without screwing anything up? And if it is successful can I then join it to Macintosh HD partition without loosing the data?

Thanks

Any help with diskutil please???

student said:

Any help with diskutil please???

Click to expand...

Hey, student, private message me with a time you are available, your email address and/or aim/jabber/gmail and I will help you through it.