Gparted Problem

[Big Olmec Head]

Hi
I wonder if anyone can help me. A little background, I wanted to move my xp install to a bigger hard drive. I used Saikee's method and worked fine (as usual). My machine was a dual boot system, the xp partition was with little space so I get rid of my vista install, deleted its partition. That went fine also. Rebooted directly to XP.

The problem is as follows:

a) In order to increase the size of my xp partition (old machine, athlon64 1gb of RAM) I moved my data partition to the left in order to have unallocated space near the xp partition. That was successful, I rebooted and everything was fine.

b) I run again Gparted and increased the size of the partition. Gparted told me the process was successfully applied. I rebooted.

c) after post I get the following error "error reading disk, press ctr-alt-del". I did it like five times and I get the same message.

d) With my xp install disk I tried fixboot and fixmbr and nothing changed

Since I have the original hd, I did it again, and the same thing happened after resizing xp partition, before the resizing process I was able to boot normally.

I used Gparted live cd v 0.6.2 and as far as I recall I left "adjust to mib" option

I hope any one can help me (please)

Thanks before hand

The Big Olmec Head

[saikee]

If I understand your case correctly you have no problem in migrating the systems to a larger hard disk.

Your problem starts if you delete a partition in front of the Xp and expand Xp to absorb its space. That may create havoc.

Firstly the partition you are deleting sounds like one recognised by Xp as you said you got rid of the Vista. Your Xp was originally installed behind Vista and so it registry would have been stamped that it was installed in the "D" drive as Vista would be detected and mounted as the "C" drive. Now after nuking Vista partition the empty space would be on the "left" hand side of the Xp partition and you use Gparted to expnad Xp to absorb this space. You Xp is now forced to boot up as a "C" drive and not the originally installed "D" drive. This is something Xp cannot tolerates.

Also if you have not defraged the Xp partition before the migration and still use the virtual memory then there will be "immovable files" inside the partition and so expanding the partition to the left will not work in this case. Expanding Xp to the right should be alright though because the extra space is just empty.

Secondly Xp if installed later with a Vista in the front of the hard disk will most likely has its boot loader NTLDR deposited in the Vista partition by the XP installer. Therefore nuking your Vista must destroy the XP's boot loader too.

As a rule expanding the partition to the left seldom works for an operating system. It is perfectly OK for a data-only partition though.

My recommendation is that you are better off by adhering to the original drive letter Xp has installed and this means keeping the Vista partition.

It is possible to rebuild the XP boot loader from scratch but the Xp partition should also always moved/transferred by dd so that the system integrity is not compromised (the files positions relative to each other remain unchanged) . You can actually boot a Xp by a floppy by copying the bootloader files onto it. In general it is a huge amount of work to change the installed drive letter and I haven't seen any recommendation to do it right.

[woodrolf]

my computer has lage hard disk,so no need to change

[Big Olmec Head]

Thanks for the reply,

You are right, I did not have any problem cloning the hd, but I made a little mistake in my description:

The first partition in my old hd was xp's (originally it was the first OS I installed in my machine), then data, then vista, then apps, therefore I moved after getting rid off vista I moved to the RIGHT (silly me :p) the data partition. This let first xp, then unallocated space, then data then apps and unallocated space. Rebooting allowed me to go directly to xp, I even was able to check some stuff (my wife's files).

After this I rebooted with gparted cd, increased the size, rebooted and the "problem reading disk" message appears.

Sorry for the description's mistake

[saikee]

OK. If your Xp is in the first partition then it should work out.

I would re-clone the disk.

My first step to to verify the cloned disk that Xp boots successfully first.

Then I would delete the 2nd data partition, 3rd Vista and another other partition. Reboot and ensure Xp still boots.

I would remove the vitual memory so that there is no immovable file inside the Xp partition. You can see the immovable files if you use the "defrag" program.

Finally I will use Gparted to expand the partition to the right.

Depending on the file structure the Xp might want to do a chkdsk. My experience is the partition should have no problem with passing such a check/test.

[Big Olmec Head]

Thanks again for the reply, I followed your advise, just to hit the wall again.

Before doing it again, I booted (with my original drive) and received a message saying "disk boot disk failure, insert a system disk and press enter" I checked I did not have anything on the cd drive (no floppy though) hit ctrl+alt+del and get in to my system normally.

I followed your directions twice, left the xp partition alone, rebooted after each part of the process a and I was able to boot with the new drive until resizing, that is when I receive the message "error reading disk..

So I think the boot files/system is messed up in the original drive and when I re-size in the copy it makes somehow the drive to be unreadable. Thanks for all the help, I am thinking to start with a fresh install of winxp (my wife´s choice) and since I will have like 100mb of free space install debian.

Gracias y Saludos desde Mexico

The Big Olmec Head