Ouupps!!! I've messed something up with Gparted

ibex · 07-28-2009, 05:13 PM

I have a dual boot (Vista / OpenSuse 11.1) system. Today I tried to resize some of the partitions using Gparted and the operations did not go through completely, so I was hoping that everything would still work okay. Alas, my system gives an error when trying to boot: "Error No bootable device".

I booted with the OpenSuse DVD and tried to repair the Grub, which did not pass the tests, as well as the fstab, which did not have the Windows partition mounted. The Grub gets re-installed "succesfully" and then the repair utility finds it to have errors again.

I am thinking of fixing the MBR with the Vista DVD and trying again.

Any advice out there would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I found that Gparted cannot resize Vista partitions, and (probably) that is how I have messed my system up. The question is whether things can get fixed.

pljvaldez · 07-28-2009, 06:09 PM

I would try booting System Rescue CD and using testdisk (openSuse may have testdisk also).

explodingzebras · 07-28-2009, 06:43 PM

Even better than that is Super Grub Disk which has saved my bacon many times.

ibex · 07-28-2009, 07:15 PM

Awesome !!!
Super Grub Disk help me to boot my OpenSuse.
However, there must be something wrong with the resized Vista partition... I probably need to reset the MBR with the Windows Vista installation DVD. Will this potentially mess up my Linux system?

syg00 · 07-28-2009, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ibex

PS. I found that Gparted cannot resize Vista partitions, and (probably) that is how I have messed my system up.

Not true - IMHO all partition resizing should be done from the gparted liveCD, and it handles Vista NTFS fine.

Quote:

However, there must be something wrong with the resized Vista partition... I probably need to reset the MBR with the Windows Vista installation DVD. Will this potentially mess up my Linux system?

If there are errors on NTFS, you have to fix them from Windows. However if the chainload from grub fails to boot up Vista, then you may have a (much) bigger problem - merely replacing the MBR is unlikely to rectify it. It won't affect your Linux system, merely grub booting; easily fixed later by re-writing the MBR again.
You may be able to run a chkdsk from the Vista DVD - haven't tried.

ibex · 07-29-2009, 12:33 AM

Thank you for the reminder about the backup; the problem is that my external disks were full (in fact, at least I did backup all my data but not the OS partitions). Anyway, my troubles are gone. Thanks to Super Grab Disk I was able to boot my Linux system from the respective partition and from there I fixed Grub. After, I rebooted with the Vista installation DVD and simply selected "Repair System". The next booting was smooth as butter.

Thank you for your help folks.