1 Topic by insyder19

  • insyder19
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Topic: cannot boot my vista cd to install vista after using gparted =(

hey,

first question is this:

i have a harddrive thats 400gb big or so.

when i used gparted it looks like this:

FIRST PART           SECOND PART                      THIRD PART

17gb (vista                 230gb music                      60gb empty
was installed
here)


NOW; is it true that I cannot merge the first part and the third part into one and install vista on it? Because the second part is between them and blocks them or????

HOWEVER,

I tried it didnt work, so I was like lets install vista anyway.

Closed gparted and wanted to boot from the vista cd and I cant. everything is setup correctly in my BIOS, I choose to boot from my cd rom but it doesn't. I still can access gparted though.

Any idea of how to fix this?

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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  • Registered: 2008-07-31
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Re: cannot boot my vista cd to install vista after using gparted =(

Hi!

insyder19 wrote:

NOW; is it true that I cannot merge the first part and the third part into one and install vista on it? Because the second part is between them and blocks them or????

Correct. A partition always is a single contiguous chunk of storage space, so if you want to join the first and third cunks on your drive, you'd have to move the second one out of the way. Which is quite easy, since the third chunk is empty:
Right-click the "music" partition and select "Resoze/move". A new windows will open, showing you the selected partition and the neighboring free areas. Then, click- and-drag the partition in this new windowsw and drag it ass far to the right as possible. "Apply" the changes, and click "Apply" again in the icon bar at the top of the GParted window. Then wait for the operation to finish.
Then, you can either resize your "original" Vista partition (using the "Resize/Move" dialog on this partition - this time, you don't click-and-drag the whole partition, but only the small black arrowhead at the right end of the partition) - or simply delete it, if you want a new Vista install on your drive.

Closed gparted and wanted to boot from the vista cd and I cant. everything is setup correctly in my BIOS, I choose to boot from my cd rom but it doesn't. I still can access gparted though.

Any error messages, screen shots or the like?

3 Reply by insyder19

  • insyder19
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Re: cannot boot my vista cd to install vista after using gparted =(

Hey,

thanks for the reply.

Yea I get this error:

When I try to boot from the gparted CD I get the error:

ISOLINUX 3.72..................................................
isolinux disk error 20. AX = 4210, Drive EF

"boot failed: press a key to retry"


When I try to boot from my vista cd I notice that my DVD ROM doesnt even try to run the dvd, instead I get an error similar to this like:

"enter a boot device and retry"

4 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: cannot boot my vista cd to install vista after using gparted =(

Hi!

insyder19 wrote:

When I try to boot from the gparted CD I get the error:

ISOLINUX 3.72..................................................
isolinux disk error 20. AX = 4210, Drive EF

"boot failed: press a key to retry"

This error message is created by the boot loader used on the GParted LiveCD. The fact that you see this message means two things:
1. Your system does boot off the CD (which will be more important later on), and
2. there is some problem with your CD-ROM drive, BIOS, or with the CD itself (otherwise you wouzld not get thgis error message. Sorry, I did not dig into ISOLINUX to figure out what exactly this message means...)
Maybe you can get around this error by
- downloading the GParted LiveCD again (and verifying its MD5 checksum, to be sure the download is intact!);
- burning it again - to a different brand of CD-R;
- burning it again at a lower speed; or
- burning it to a CD-RW instead of a CD-R (CD-RW tend to be more stable in holding their data compared to CD-R due to the completele different recoding technology used in CD-RWs).

When I try to boot from my vista cd I notice that my DVD ROM doesnt even try to run the dvd, instead I get an error similar to this like:

"enter a boot device and retry"

This message looks like it is thrown by the computer's BIOS - which is not able to locate anything bootable, so it tells you about this and aborts. This could mean that your DVD drive is broken or does not like the DVD (or in fact is a CD drive - yes, they are still around, and you still find them in some very cheap computer systems!). Possibly a firmware update for the DVD drive could help (but aou might as well destroy the drive if something goes wrong during the update - so be careful and think twice before performing an update!).
Maybe the DVD is bad, as well (check if you can read it in a different drive).