after new swap partition, "NTLDR is missing"
 

I'm having odd problems after using Gparted. my system has a 40 GB hard drive with approximately the following partitions:
1. 18 GB Primary Windows partition with Win XP (VFAT)
2. 18 GH Extended Windows partition (VFAT)
3. 1.7 GB Ext2 storage partition (Ext2)

I used gparted to shrink the first partition to make a 448 MB swap partition. However, I now get "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart" when trying to boot into XP.

Using Puppy I installed GRUB on the MBR to see if that would help, but no luck. I'm not able to get a Windows XP setup CD but I have an ISO image of one, from which I have recopied NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM to hda1 using Puppy. I have also edited boot.ini which seems to be correct. Finally I tried deleting the swap partition and resized the first partition to its original size.

But, still no luck.... by the way all the data on the first partition appears to be intact and fsck reports no problems. Any ideas?

Have a look at this page http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

It has many different solutions.

I had actually seen that page and tried all of the solutions, to no avail. I also got a Windows XP setup CD, but the recovery console and the fixboot/fixmbr commands had no effect. Even doing a full reinstall on that partition didn't work - same message still came.

It would also seem that most of those problems are unlikely to be the reason, considering that the issue started as soon as I used Gparted to resize the primary Windows partition. Fdisk informed me from Puppy that the latter two partitions did not end on cylinder boundaries, while Gparted complained that it couldn't resize the extended partition because there was an invalid cylinder number in it.

Two methods eventually fixed the problem. One was to change the bootable flag to the ext2 partition, reformat it as FAT32, and install WinXP onto that. That worked. However, the partitions were too oddly sized to be useful and re-sizing them seemed like it might just lead to the same original problem, so eventually I just re-partitioned and re-formatted the whole drive. Luckily my main system is a pen drive-based Puppy so I didn't lose any important data.

I suspect Gparted was the culprit. Will have to be careful in future.

shankargopal,
that's interesting. I have successfully shrunk a ntfs partition.
if I recall rightly, I went into XP first and ran the full check-drive
thing, with surface check, and the defragment utility.
...maybe that is important, before running GParted?
...but you problem seems to be a more complex situation.

Thanks for the response, Barry. By the way the issue here was not an NTFS partition but a VFAT one - hence the mystery to some extent. Unfortunately I can't check much more now that I had to reformat that hard drive.

No idea what happened, though. Especially because the partition table apparently got damaged in some sense but didn't affect anything except XP's boot sector.