• MBR Partition Table Not in Sequential Order

    Home » Forums » AskWoody support » Windows » Windows Vista, XP and earlier » Questions: Vista, XP back to 3.1 » MBR Partition Table Not in Sequential Order

    Author
    Topic
    #1768228

    I am having a problem. I am trying to load Win NT Server 4.0 on a partition at the beginning of my hard drive. I have the first 2MB open, the next 8MB I have Windows 2000 Professional installed and the last 4MB is an extended partition (D: drive). I cannot get Win NT Server to install. During the text-based setup it will not reformat my 2GB partition. If the partition is unformatted I get the error message, “Setup has encountered an error and cannot continue. Contact technical support for assistance. The following status will assist them in diagnosing the problem. (0x5, 0, 0, 0x1). Setup cannot continue. To quite setup, press F3.” If the partition is already formatted it says, “Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged. Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to your computer. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated. Consult your computer or SCSI adapter documentation for more information.” This is how the text-based screen appears just before it tries to format the partition:

    C: Unformatted or Damaged 1953MB
    — Unknown 7562MB
    Unpartitioned space 4267MB

    A few things that are curious:
    1. Why does it say that the C: drive is unformatted or damaged when it is neither?
    2. The “unknown” partition is where Windows 2000 Professional is installed.
    3. The “Unpartitioned space” is where my extended partition (D: drive) is.

    In running partinfo (under PartitionMagic 5.01) I noticed the message, “MBR Partition Table Not in Sequential Order”. I upgraded to version 6.0 and ran again partinfo. A brief section of it is attached below. While I do not see this same message (under version 6.0) you can see the MBR partition table is not sequential. Must I reformat my entire hard drive and do a restore from a tape backup of my Windows 2000 Professional partition? And then create a new partition for Win NT Server 4.0? I am not sure what caused the MBR partition table to become unsequential. Any help you could give would be extremely grateful!

    Disk Geometry Information for Disk 1: 1757 Cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track

    System PartSect # StartSect NumSects
    ======================================================
    (Win2000 Pro) 0 0 4,000,185 15,486,660
    MS-MS-DOS_6 0 1 63 4,000,122
    (Extended Drive) 0 2 19,486,845 8,739,360

    The MS-DOS_6 is actually the first partition on the physical disk, followed by Win2000 Pro, and then the Extended partition.

    Gregory J Toland
    Sr. Systems Architect
    CHM Inc.
    (301) 457-8058
    tolan002@census.gov

    Viewing 0 reply threads
    Author
    Replies
    • #1778476

      I Assume the first partition is FAT 16. What drive letters are the partitions when you boot in Win 2000? Have you tried installing WIN NT from within Win 2000?

      • #1778550

        Yes, the first is FAT16. I either can boot into one of two OS’s.
        1. MS DOS 6.2 (C: drive only running FAT16)
        2. Win2000 Pro (C: drive for OS, D: extended drive for Data)
        Both are running NTFS.

        I did not try to install NT from within Win2000. I wasn’t sure if would overwrite the OS.

    Viewing 0 reply threads
    Reply To: MBR Partition Table Not in Sequential Order

    You can use BBCodes to format your content.
    Your account can't use all available BBCodes, they will be stripped before saving.

    Your information: