Hi,

I used Gparted (live cd)on a drive with all space formatted as ntfs (c, and I wanted to break it up in more partitions.

I notice everytime windows is allowed to do partitioning (previously) it leaves about 7 mb as unallocated, this was in front of the primary partition. Why? Not the MBR is it?

Anyway, now xp hangs at the welcome screen or slightly before, says windows xp, and will not boot up, not even in safe mode. Could this unallocated be a problem? Never looked at it a graph before.

If not what else could I do to not have to start over? If I have partition magic should I have used it?

The rest of the way I did things was right, primary, boot flag, extended and logical partitions, etc...

I just used gparted cause I wanted to setup other filesystems for linux like reiser and xfs.

Also I defraged the c: first and it was a brand new install after a zero fill.

Please let me know if more info is needed, cause I am silly and didn't backup.

You can boot to windows from live cd using grub.....
but first you have to know where your xp live....

try this from grub shell ( I hope gparted using grub ):
root (hd0,0) Enter
makeactive Enter
chainloader +1 Enter
boot Enter

or

root (hd0,1) Enter
makeactive Enter
chainloader +1 Enter
boot Enter

I don't know how to do that but I would guess that it does boot xp, since the blue task bar goes by and the welcome screen almost arrives. I used system rescue cd to boot (0,0) and it did the same thing.

I know that the 8 mb unallocated is nothing to do with the mbr cause I used ranish and it said that the mbr was separate. I also tried to use fdisk/mbr was gave the same results.

I believe I need to check the primary partition for errors like with a scan disk or something, or possibly use ubcd4win to solve the problem.

Any other suggestions welcome.

Could you give me your complete partition table on your system? Just run gparted live cd again, and maybe you could post the picture or describe it with something like this:

==============================
| | |
| 8 gb windows | 2 gb linux |
| | |
==============================

If you want to boot to your windows from live cd using my method, boot your gparted live cd:
it will give you prompt... when you hit enter, it will boot the linux kernel, and window manager and so on.......
but don't hit enter.... press c or e ( I don't remember )
You will get the grub shell and could try my method.

one 160 gig drive

c:windows (primary, boot, 30gig), d:win page file partiton (4gig)e:win home(30gig) the rest unallocated for linux not setup yet.

approx 15-20% of c: is used.

oh,

dev/hda

First: Use of partition magic or partition manager is highly recommended for such operations. If you want to use other file systems, format all linux partitions as ext3 in partition magic and then use gparted or qtparted or anything else to change the filesystem. Partition manager can also handle reiserfs.

Second: Windows XP usually leaves 7 mb unallocated at the end of the disk. I don't know why. It's probably a bug. However, you say that you have 7 mb at the beginning of the disk which makes me think that gparted might have read the partition table in a wrong way and then written down the wrong partition table to the mbr. I believe, though, that this is not the case here because you say that you can see the xp logo.

Third: Use microsoft's chkdsk to check this partition for errors. Boot from the XP cdrom, press R to enter the recovery console and run chkdsk. It will probably solve all of your problems.

Finally: If you can boot into xp (i.e. see the xp logo), there is no reason to try these grub commands.

kind of figured that thanks. Does anyone know if this is a problem with gparted.

chkdsk didn't work. And for some reason I can't get ubcd4win to work. I will not build the .iso

To me it seems that you need to reinstall your wxp and I don't think you need such a large page file for windows, besides windows will create one on the available drives anyway; you do not need a separate partition for this. Personally (I build computers for a living) I set up a hard drive for windows and linux as follows:

in case you need acces to a common storage partition from both os it would look something like this:

C:\ drive for wxp to live on 10 to 15 Gb is heaps! (including its page file) use ntfs.

install wxp there and then boot up your live distro and partition the rest of your hard drive with either qtparted or gparted (I am unfamiliar with the latter) as follows:

c:win 10gb ntfs | linux / partition 10gb ext3 | 512Mb swap | remainder (extended) fat32 |

you could choose to chop the fat32 partition into multiple chunks or even format part of it as ext3. bare in mind though that all Linux native formats are not recognized by windows.

in order to get maximum use out of your fat32 partition in Linux you need to change a line in fstab, example:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs auto,umask=000 0 0

this will make it as easy accesible in linux as in windows. I know this has a security risk as anyone can modify and all, but not more than it already had under wxp.

in order to save space on your windows xp partition you should install all non hardware related software on the fat32 partition (not on C:\) I personally install all drivers and related software on C:\ including some system utilities like a firewall and anti virus software. all the rest on the storage partition.

Ron.

and btw, that line in fstab goes into the static section so it is already mounted when linux boots

The gparted liveCD is fine for resizing NTFS.
However the partition used for booting (usually C: in M$oft parlance) can't have its starting location physically moved. You have to "shrink" from the end, not the start.