LinuxQuestions.org - Broken Windows Boot

Hi Everyone,

Well, I knew if I tried hard enough I could finally break something. It happens to be my Windows installation. I had about 130GB of space left on the the Windows partition, so I thought I would resize it (using GPARTD) and install an additional Linux distro. However, silly as I am, I realized after I had done this that I already had four primary partitions on this drive and could not add anymore. So, rather than have 20GB of unusable space, I simply resized it back to its original size. Now, of course, I cannot boot Windows because I have somehow screwed up the partition. However, the installation is intact as I can access and examine all of the Windows files from Linux. It just will not boot; it attempts to boot normally and then an instaneous "blue screen" appears (literly for one second) and the system reboots.

This is not a life or death situation as I rarely boot into Windows, and only when I need to do some serious video editing with Adobe Premier Pro (unfortunately, this is the one area that Linux is sorely lacking.) If I can't fix it, so be it. I will not do anything to damage the Linux installations I have installed (I have five on this one machine).

My question is this: is repair to repair the Windows boot possible without risking any damage to my Linux partitions, particularly since I use Grub on the MBR to boot all five distros? I have read several instructions on using the FIXBOOT command from the Windows recovery console, but, from what I read, there is a risk that it will remove the Grub installation.

So, if anyone has any thoughts or knowledge of how to deal with this, I certainly would appreciate it.

Bob