Well, I have only demolished the boot record of the primary hard drive, but that shouldn’t be too hard to fix.
I have finally decided to turn my computer over to using multiple operating systems. Since I had no desire to partition drive 2, I decided to partition drive 1. Since Drive 1 has the recovery information for my system on the initial partition I believe that my partitioning of the other chunk of the drive may have been my downfall.
I have done some repartitioning using the gparted livecd I had on hand, but that 6GB fat32 partition at the front must be throwing me off. Tomorrow I am going to wipe that out and start with a clear drive.
So long Compaq Recovery Partition! You have caused me enough annoyance, I shall not miss thee.
For the record, I had installed XP Pro on the system, but the recovery system uses XP Home. Recovery tries to use the recovery partition to take the OS back to original installation state while leaving added programs in place. Trying to recover XP Home SP 1 over XP Pro fully patched did not turn out well. It was painful to use.
Well, it took some work, but I got that stupid Recovery partition out of there and I am running smooth again. I have left unpartitioned space on the drive for other operating systems. Ubuntu here I come.
What is really nice is that I had goofed up a keyboard remapping on the previous install and lost my “?” key so I had to use ALT-63 for all my interrogatory statements.