Hello all. I hope you'll forgive my posting a solicitation for XP advice here. However, I believe I've two good reasons (excuses?) for doing so. 1) My problems started after using QtParted, and 2) I know the GNU community is a much friendlier and tech-conversant source for asking advice.

Ok. Let's see if I can paint this picture for you.

I originally installed XP on a SATA drive (pain in the ass, believe me. Why XP can't read additional install drivers from CD I don't know). That worked well enough. Blah blah, windows flaws and limitations, necessary virus scanner, 3rd-party firewall, two malware scanners, etc... blah...

Decided to give Linux a shot. Procured second drive (plain ol IDE this time). Installed FC6... ATi still has no Xorg 7.1 support, so no 3d acceleration. Blah. Really wanted to play Linux Quake3, heh. Switched to SuSE 10.1. Hmmm. Right off the bat it can't determine the correct hertz/resolution info. Ugly desktop, shrunken down and surrounded by void of black. Managed to install ATi's drivers (process was actually very smooth). 3d! Yay!

Remembered having swap on different HDD than main system HDD can boost efficiency. Felt courageous (stupid), and used QtParted bootable cd to resize NTFS drive minus 4gb (because I may purchase 2gigs for the machine in the future). Didn't know what I was doing, really. Made linuxswap it's own primary partition, 'stead of logical. Forgive my ignorance.

XP refuses to boot now. Have dabbled in testdisk, BootItNG, some other stuff, trying to fix the problem. The BSOD comes right after the XP splash. Gives basically no information at all.

Further, repair console from OEM CD can't even register the existence of the XP install (it never asks for Administrator password). The volume is also scheduled for chkdsk, which is a hoot, since I can't login to perform it, ha! I've long forgotten my Admin password, since I don't use that account. Downloaded password reset bootable program... won't change password before volume is chkdsk'd. Hah, again.

So.... how do I perform FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, etc... without being able to login to windows, and without the OEM setup CD being able to detect the install? Should I try unplugging my IDE (linux) drive? Changing the bios bootorder from HD0 to SCSI?

Is there any package for FC6 (using it for now, will switch back to SuSE 10.1 soon) that can run chkdsk, or an equivalent, that will clear the chkdsk schedule for my SATA volume so I can manipulate it? I mean, I can mount my SATA just fine, but Linux is quick to let me know the volume needs chkdsk, and warms me so.

Is it safe to try to copy all my data (about 50 gigs worth) from my XP drive to, say, a FAT32 linux partition? I think the data itself is okay. I believe the problem is in the boot sector, or MBR, somewhere.

BootItNG tells me the MBR might not boot NT. And also that NTLDR is truncated (probably happened in the resize). Is it possible to simply re-write boot.ini, NTLDR and NTDETECT.com from FC6? Is NTFS-writing that stable and safe with ntfs3g?

I apologize for the long-winded cry for help.

Any information I can supply I will be glad to do so.

At this point, I'm ready to totally migrate everything to Linux and be done with XP once and for all. And the more I hear about Vista, the less I like it.

Thanks for reading this. And mods, if this thread belongs anywhere else, I apologize in advance.

Hi DeadAmaranth and welcome to LQ.org.

Resizing NTFS partitions can be tricky. Usually, if the disk is not defragmented a couple of times before trying to resize it, it can really ruin things. My suggestion here is to boot up with a Linux Live CD (such as Knoppix) and transfer/backup your important files from the Windows partition to another HD or even another PC if you can. Then reinstall Windows.

I think this is the safest approach to avoid losing data. Maybe somebody else will have another suggestion. I would recommend you to try to restore Windows boot sector with the Windows CD, but if it is not even recognizing that you actually have Windows installed, I doubt there will be much you can do about that .

Sounds like you'll find out soon, because that will probably end up being your lifeline.

But since you have a windows handy, your best bet might actually be installing windows to a second harddrive or another partition. And checking the harddrive for errors on windows. Then defragmenting.

I used to be performance nut too. Sure its true, but not really worth it. Once you start needing swap, you're going to notice regardless. RAIDED harddrives still don't even deliver a fraction of the performance of ram. Best to get more ram. Thats why I don't really bother building machines under 2gb of ram anymore.

Also BTW, as a side note.. you should know that most windows performance tweaks do less than nothing. That is, following some of the tips can actually harm your system. This sounds like something along the same lines as those tips.

Sounds like you moved the start of the partition rather than the (other) end. Windoze keeps too much location dependant information for that to work unless you can update that info as well. The linux ntfsresize doesn't pretend to - in fact specifically warns against doing this.
If you can read your data, move it off and re-install, and move it back. Better be just data though - installed programs won't like this either.
Simply re-writing the load-time code (probably) won't work - you might get it to boot, but the registry will still be history.

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah, I do believe I should simply reinstall XP. Meh.

Incidentally, I did defrag the drive before resizing. Four times in a row, if I'm not mistaken! I also temporarily disabled swap and hibernation, so I could move those files during resize.

I don't know why I didn't think to make a small FAT32 partition on my IDE drive and install XP there. Funny, the little things you forget about when under duress.

I'm hesitant to write to my NTFS drive using ntfs3g (you know, in order to recreate the boot files). So I suppose I'll just do a read-only transfer, and port my personal files over to FC6 for now.

This brings another question:

I have a separate partition for /usr/local/home with about 43 Gigs free (I have /home symlinked to /usr/local/home in order to have as small a / partition as possible). Apparently, there is almost nothing in that partition. And not much in /usr for that matter. Wonder where all the rpms I download go, hehe. Are GNU packages really THAT small?!

So, seeing as how I have no data in /home, can I use mkfs (and if so, how?) to change the filesystem type to FAT32? I need it as FAT so I can access these files from XP later on. See, I have bought quite a bit of software for XP. I have a two year "subscription" to Agnitum Outpost Firewall, for one. And I'd like to get my money's worth before I abandon XP altogether. Not to mention, gaming. I don't want to use wine if I can help it.

Although I hear there is still no solid substitute for foobar2000, my favorite audio player. This puzzles me, considering how the functionality and design of foobar strikes me as so *nix-like. Not to mention the name.. I mean, hello?!

Oh, and just to give some more info on the problem, here is the relevant SATA drive info that "testdisk /list" reports in the terminal:




....

Also, does anyone have a clue why lq.org keeps telling me I'm not logged in? I've got cookies, java, etc.. enabled in Opera. Curious.

Actually, I moved the end of the partition, not the beginning. I did know enough about bootsectors not to touch the head of the disk, hehe.

Yeah, I'm tired of rebooting my computer over and over anyway. So reinstall is the choice I'm following.

As far as (OS-independent) backup, um, not really feasible. I have no other HDD except the one hosting FC6. No other PC. And no DVD-burner, and I'm sure as hell not going to try to back up 40-50 Gigs onto CD, haha! Still, it's good advice for the future.

Yeah I see that now from the testdisk output.
Dunno - I've used ntfsresize dozens of time successfully. However, I always use the CLI (rather than a GUI front-end like gtparted) so I can see any problems.
I have had one occasion where it flat out refused to do the job, and chkdsk wouldn't clean up the problem. So I just left it alone.

ROFL
I can't stop lathing I just fixed it to friend few hours ago here what we did:
- We copied those 3 files to floppy disk:
* boot.ini
* NTDETECT.COM
* ntldr
That to boot windows.
- After you boot it copy the files to c:
- Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management
- Right click on the Windows partition and set it bootable if that doesn't work delete the Linux partitions and reinstall.
- Now you got two choices to boot the OS's MBR or using bootpart to boot Linux with NPTL.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I figured it out. Or, rather, I gave in to defeat and re-installed XP from scratch. Ported my data over to a FAT32 (lba) partition on my IDE drive, re-formatted the SATA drive, and started over.

I suppose syg00 was correct after all, because I can't think of what else would have gone wrong. Like I said, I defragged four times or so in a row beforehand.

I think I was careless when I resized the partition in QtParted. I believe I didn't pay attention to the fact that when you adjust the amount of free space after a partition, it can increase (or decrease) free space before the partition. I must have done so, and in the process killed my bootsector. Oops!

Well, this is how we learn.

Thanks, again.

Yep, that is exactly what you did(and what I did just last week!)Tis a bugger I know but hey, that's what I got for trying to resize partitions in the pub after a few pints! Mine was so bad tho even partition magic couldn't see any partitions...except one large yellow one named BAD lol! Anyway, for me I could not get grub at all, thankfully my friend is a linux nut and he sat there 'in the zone' so to speak, sweating away, poor lad! He managed to get grub back from where ever it (I) hid itself. Sigh, I was ready to wipe Windoze anyway, but I'm glad he fixed it.