Hi,

Sorry for asking a Vista question on a Linux forum - but Linux is the only way I'm going to fix this problem short of reformatting.

I recently resized my NTFS partition from within Ubuntu 7.10 with GParted and the ntfs-utils package. I've seen one other thread on this topic that only reccomends reinstall, but that was on XP and on a much olderr version of the NTFS utilities that had warnings on them.

In the man page it suggests changing drive access mode to LBA from my bios - but unfortunately I can't thanks to HP's lockdown.

I also can't use ntfs-utils to access the drive because 'the volume is dirty' and I can't chkdsk it till I boot Windows - catch 22.

Ideas would be very much appreciated.

In my experience, you usually have to run a check disk on Windows after it's been resized or after Linux has been installed. I don't have experience with it directly, but I was present when a friend was doing it. After the check disk ran, Vista booted just fine.

Hope you backed up your data.

Brandon

Ah, I don't keep data that is non-disposable Windows side anyway - not stable enough yet (give it a few years - it may catch up).

Thing with running checkdisk is that I can't until I boot - and I can't boot without checkdisk.

So... do you have Windowphobia? Fear of booting into Windows? I don't see why you can't boot into Windows and let it run it's chkdsk on the NTFS partition. Let it do it's thing, then you should be able to boot Windows and mount the NTFS partition.

Regards,

Brandon

No.
Perhaps I can draw attention to the thread title? " NTFS-utils Resize caused Vista to fail to boot on SATA HDD"

The important bit here is that something failing to boot means that I can't boot into Windows.

The fact that I can't mount the partition is just another symptom. (I have no real desire to mount my Windows partition on Linux unless I have to since I have a separate partition to share files between the two)

Was this a Vista built machine, or was Vista added later ???.
How did you resize - did you move the start (the "left hand" side) of the partition ???.

This machine had vista added later.
I am fairly sure I moved the end of the partition, because when I downsized the Vista partition earlier (some time ago last year) the space came from the end - but I didn't note it down during this resize.

I used Ultimate boot CD for windows
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
to get out of a similar mess a few days ago.

But I already had that CD. It's not legal to distribute the .iso file. Instead the downloadable tools let me build the .iso from downloaded software mixed with content from the XP system I was running on. I don't know if that works as well on Windows other than XP or if you have any healthy Windows system at all on which to build that .iso file. Once you have the .iso file, it isn't limited to repairing the same version, but I'm not totally sure it would repair Vista. (I just needed to checkdisk and defrag ntfs on a sick Windows 2000 system).

I used the gparted liveCD to do similar (to the OP) recently, and Vista (home premium) took about 45 minutes to run through recovery on reboot, but eventually came up. I've heard of problems where the machine was a Vista build in that Vista will use a different allocation scheme. In that case the Linux (and XP as it happens) utilities won't touch the partitions.

In your case you should be able to chkdsk from the Vista CD.

Hi all,

Thanks for suggestions - I'll try the checkdisk from the Vista CD tomorrow afternoon, when I've done that I'll create an UBCD for next time that I screw my system up like this.

Sorry, I was under the impression it wouldn't boot because the checkdisk hadn't run yet. I was thinking for some reason unknown to me you didn't want it to do that.

In the cases I've seen, it wouldn't boot until it ran a checkdisk. After that, it ran, it booted just fine.

Sorry for the mixup.

Brandon