Windows7 not booting after GParted resize

[sneakytiki22]

Hi all,

I am new to ubuntu, I've been a windows user all my life. I had a bit a problem with dual booting 9.04 with windows 7. My first mistake was not consulting the resources on this site before I blindly dove in to Ubuntu.

It is pretty much the same story I'm sure you have heard a thousand times. I recently upgraded to windows 7 64-bit from vista. I decided I also wanted to dual boot ubuntu 9.04. Through the ubuntu installer I allocated 150gb to ubuntu. It installed successfully, only I discovered the partition only had about 2.5gb. I was successfully dual booting ubuntu and windows 7, but I needed more space on my ubuntu partition. So, I used GParted to shrink the windows partition and grow the ubuntu partition... and guess what! Windows 7 won't boot. When I go into GParted now, the windows partition is still there, only it is not recognized anymore. It is "Unknown". I have tried booting with the windows 7 disk and having it do the "Mr. Fix-it" autorepair windows does, but it did not work.

I only blame myself because if I had tried reading up on what I was doing before I did it, I wouldn't be in this mess. My question is if there is anything I can do to get windows to boot again, or perhaps recover the data. Out of impatience and misplaced confidence I only backed up some of my more important documents and didnt backup music, photos, all that stuff.

I am at my work computer right now, so I won't be able to paste fdisk or menu.lst outputs until I get home in a couple hours.

Thank you in advance!

[Bucky Ball]

I'm not sure if 7 is the same but with XP you could stick the installation disk in and go to 'Repair'. In there you can run help I think and there is a command containing 'chkdisk'. Run that. Then 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'.

Of course, none of this might work in 7 but fixed things when I did exactly the same thing as you running XP.

[alejaaandro]

you might be able to boot into windows from a live cd and repairing the partition (not sure if possible), or you can try testdisk ans see if it can fix the problem.. i've used it successfully a couple of times to fix ntfs partitions...

if you have valuable data, you might want to make an image of your partition, in case something goes wrong, you might be able to give it another shot if you have a backup image

[Razz27]

Hmm. What I'm thinking is that when you tried to resize the partition, gParted did something stupid, and your partition entry for windows was removed. Assuming you havn't used the pc since that happened, you should be able to recover all the data using testdisk. I would run it off an Ubuntu live cd. It should scan your hard disk and detect the windows partition. You can then re-write the partition table, and check that it's all there again with gParted.
I had a similar problem a while ago, where the windows installer decided to delete my partition table... A night of messing with testdisk and sfdisk fixed it.
I would DEFINITELY advice, if possible, image your hard disk, and save it somewhere safe, so that if anything goes wrong you have a fall-back
If you could possibly post a screenshot of gParted, or the output of fdisk when you run them from a live cd, it would help work this out...

[sneakytiki22]

Assuming you havn't used the pc since that happened, you should be able to recover all the data using testdisk. I would run it off an Ubuntu live cd. It should scan your hard disk and detect the windows partition. You can then re-write the partition table, and check that it's all there again with gParted.

I will try this when I get home. What do you mean by

"Assuming you haven't used the pc since..."?

I have been running Ubuntu since it happened last thurday. Would that foil the plan? What kind of use would close this option to me?

[Jerry N]

When you used gparted on the Win 7 partition, you might have wiped out files at located near the high end of the partition. I have observed that XP will sometimes have files near the high end even after defragmentation. Somewhere on these forums I have read that shrinking the Vista partition with anything but it's own "shrink volume" utility is a no-no.

Jerry

[louieb]

Starting with Vista - MSoft made some changes to the way it installs itself in a partition. Gparted can deal with it but should have the round to cylinder unchecked.

From the Gparted FAQ

9 : After resizing my Vista partition, Vista won't boot. How can I fix this?

The following article by the How-To Geek contains useful information regarding resizing your Vista partition, and getting it to boot again.
Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition

If your PC did not come with a complete Vista installation CD, you can download a Vista Recovery Disc at the following link:
Windows Vista Recovery Disc

[Jerry N]

Great reference (how-to-geek)!! I have bookmarked it for future reference. I am assuming that Win 7 has similar requirements.

Jerry

[sneakytiki22]

Starting with Vista - MSoft made some changes to the way it installs itself in a partition. Gparted can deal with it but should have the round to cylinder unchecked.

From the Gparted FAQ

I have put in the windows 7 boot disk and tried a system recovery "Repair and Restart". It didn't help. I can't remember exactly what it said when it failed. I will try that again and see exactly what it says, but that was the first thing I tried. If the "round to cylinder" checkbox is checked by default I definately did not have it unchecked when I shrunk the windows partition.

[jsoellner]

How big was the windows partition before you started? How much did you resize it by?

The problem with resizing windows partitions is that windows sticks the master file table data, hibernation data and pagefiles in wierd places. I guess there may be a bonafide reason for it but it seems odd.

You can have a 100gb partition, with only the first few gigabytes used, but windows will put the MFT files right at the end of that partition.

So, by resizing it you are erasing some stuff that's pretty important to make windows work.

Sorry I know this isn't actually any help for you but if anybody else is reading this, please be careful and back up your important data before doing anything like this!

Even the partition resizing utility built into windows is pretty weak, I normally use a non-free 3rd-party program on the trial period for doing the job.