Topic: [Solved]Error Shrinking XP Partition - A Disk Error Occurred
I initially would like to start this thread off with a couple of acknowledgments. First off I have done an enormous amount of searching(by my standards..) for how to fix this problem until I eventually stumbled upon, of course, the forums of the program I was using: GParted. Upon my long search I came across this particular thread:
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13277
To be clear, there are some similarities, but moreover, lots of confusions.. So if it's okay.. I'll start with a background story of the day..
I was initially planning to split my Terabyte drive to 900 and roughly 100 gigs. I was then going to take a windows 7 installer from my 900 gig XP profile, run it, and install the windows 7 on my 100 gig partition to be able to duel boot. The plan was going well, I came across GParted after backing up all my files and was well on my way to partitioning my drives. To be succinct I ended up splitting my drive into:
Size used unused flags
/dev/sda1 ntsf 831.9GiB 185.52GiB 646.37GiB boot
/dev/sda2 ntsf 97.65GiB 67.5MiB(?) 97.59GiB
The above became my partitioned drive (sda2 that is)
This is what is directly shown from my flash drive that I mounted GParted onto, and which I am booting from.
After the partition I was happy and immeditely exited and restarted. However, upon restart, like the previous user, I encountered the
A Disk read Error Occurrred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
And of course, this being the error, restarting did not fix the problem!
Before I came across this website I attempted
/FIXBOOT
/FIXMBR
/CHKDSK /R /P
Through my windows XP cd in a frantic attempt to fix the problem.
-I also noted on some sites setting unallocated memory may have fixed the problem I first tried 10MiB as I saw that was most noted in the previous thread, however, other people on other sites said they had set aside 2GiB and it worked fine as well. So I eventually ended up with
Size
Unallocated 1.96GiB
So clarifying, unlike the previous post, the two partitions were done perfectly and there was not an extra amount of memory set aside initially, I'm not quite sure if setting that extra unallocated memory was a bad idea now..However, I don't want to continue with the solution given to the other user in case I need to do something different.
As for the solution I think I need a little more help or in depth walk through...Unfortunately, I'm only 18 and all of my Bios/PC knowledge has very sadly come through various failures and struggles I had to learn on my own...Sadly, this kind of thing happens to me quite often and this time I'm completely distraught at the fact that something I was preparing for for quite some time may be missed because of this problem. However, I did see the previous thread and the high amount of solved threads here and was hoping I would be able to get enough help to restore my larger partition, and continue my plan to duel boot with windows 7 because of the seemingly great support here!
Any and all help at this point is greatly appreciated... I was looking forward to a fully operational duel booting PC by Monday but at this rate I just want my old, large partitioned drive to work again..(I have ordered extra 4 pin connectors as I actually have an extra hard drive in my computer that is not being used.. I could easily install Windows 7 on there from my larger partition once I get this problem fixed..)
-I'm sorry for the length of this, and maybe write up ability because of age.. but I'm completely frustrated with this problem and I don't understand why this kind of thing always happens to me, or really even where to go from here other than this forum.
I sincerely thank you for reading!
-Luke
( Awake now and ready to work on this problem whenever help may arise! )
edit: So now I had a friend attempt to help me, and have deleted the 100gig as well as the small 2gig partition and restored it to the main 900gig partition. So now my drives look like:
size used unused
dev/sda1 ntfs 931.51 185.53 745.98 boot
unallocated 4.71MiB
However, the problem is still here and I still need help.
edit2: still monitoring this thread for 2 days now desperately awaiting help as I cannot use my desktop computer at all...