1 Topic by cul8er (edited by cul8er 2009-03-24 20:39:05)

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Topic: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

I have a HP notebook with Vista on a 320 gib hard drive and want to do a dual boot with XP Pro.  I've researched for the last week on using GParted and used this http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vist … htm?page=2 for the process.  I do have a HP-Recovery Drive that is 12.95 gib.  I wanted to shrink the boot drive/Vista down and get a partion of 15gib for my XP install, and I thought that is what I set it up to do according to the link above.

The GParted ver. I used is 0.4.2 and though it took a long time,(I first used a UBS drive to clone Vista and the HP Recovery), I got up this morning to find that I started out with 2 partions,(the fore mentioned), I wanted one more for XP, but I now have 4 partions as follows;

PARTION      FILE SYSTEM    LABLE         SIZE           USED        UNUSED      FLAGS
unallocated       unallocated                  7.84mib
/dev/sda1          NTFS                         270.48gib    74.45gib     196.03gib    Boot
unallocated       unallocated                  14.65gib
/dev/sda2           NTFS                          12.95gib     10.50gib       2.45gib

Did I do something wrong?  Can it be fixed and how do I do it?  Also I noticed it changed the Partions I had from "/dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2" to the "/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2".  Was that suppose to happen?

2 Reply by class413

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

From where did you use version 0.4.2? There was just a GParted testing 0.4.2 pre-release 1. Version 0.4.2 was out for just a week and was replaced by 0.4.3.


The guide of the link refers to an older GParted version. Recent versions contain a feature to align the partition limits to the cylinder limits.

I see that there are just 2 partitions and 2 unallocated parts. The first one is very small, 7.84mib, and it seems to be just the alignment to the cylinder limits. The second one is obviously what you looked for.

Although it is possible to schedule many operations in GParted, we often recommend to proceed step by step, checking the system after each step. It is perhaps more time consuming but we think it is safer, as recovery could be easier after one step only. Furthermore, we recommend a previous backup, because there are many things that could eventually go bad.


The "hda" or "sda" names are related to the hardware interface. hd* is normally used for ATA drives, sd* for SCSI and SATA drives. It isn't really important. However I can't understand why the same system and GParted version change this (unless you did any ghange in the BIOS setup). I don't know if it is related to the Linux version used in the cd you used (you don't write if you used any GParted livecd or any other rescue cd).

If your system is booting up and works, you don't need any fix.

(Topic moved to the live media section)

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by gedakc (edited by gedakc 2009-03-24 18:46:31)

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

Unallocated space is not the same as a partition because it does not take up an entry in the partition table.  Hence you still have only 2 partitions.  My assumption is that the one of the /dev/sda1 partitions is simply a typo and should be /dev/sda2.  :-)

It is difficult to determine where these partitions are on the disk without the sector numbers.  Would you be able to provide the output from the following command?
     fdisk -l -u

The above command should be run in a terminal session from the GParted LiveCD.

In some versions of GNU/Linux, IDE drives are listed as /dev/hda#.  Other times they may be treated like an SATA drive with the name /dev/sda#.  This is simply the device name that GNU/Linux uses to access the device and does not represent any change to the disk device.

EDIT:  Ah, I see that class413 was responding at the same time as I was.  :-)

4 Reply by cul8er

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

class413 wrote:

From where did you use version 0.4.2? There was just a GParted testing 0.4.2 pre-release 1. Version 0.4.2 was out for just a week and was replaced by 0.4.3. )

I seen in another thread that a mod suggested to another newbie to use 0.4.2 instead.

I did the setup the way it was suggested on that link I posted and thought, that was easy.....But I did'nt do anything but was mentioned there.  Nor did I go into the BIOS. 

As far as booting up, I haven't tried yet, I wanted to make sure what I did is what was suppose to be done to do a dual boot with Vista and XP.  I thought that what I did do, would create 1 new Partition behind the "boot" one I already had.  But seeing the small one that was also made, has got me fixed up.  Do I need that there?

5 Reply by cul8er (edited by cul8er 2009-03-24 19:34:20)

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

My bad.  I did do a typeO in the post, but just fixed it.
I did the fdisk you asked for and there's the results;

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = of 1 * 512 =512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc5fcbd5f

    Device   Boot           Start             End                 Blocks          Id       System
/dev/sda1         *              16065      567255149      283619542+     7       HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2                    597971430    625137344       13582957+     7       HPFS/NTFS
root@debian:~#

6 Reply by gedakc (edited by gedakc 2009-03-24 19:26:45)

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

From your recent post, it appears that your recovery partition is at the end of the drive.

The small unallocated space at the beginning of the drive can be left just as it is with no problems.

I would recommend booting into Vista twice to ensure that Vista is able to perform all of the file system checks it desires.

If Vista does not boot, you may need to boot from a Vista DVD to use the recovery console.  Details on how to do this can be found in the GParted FAQ point number 9.

7 Reply by cul8er

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

Accoring to that link I posted, it stated that the MBR for Vista will go bad and that to do the repair after installing XP, because XP will re-write over it anyways.  So should I stick with the link on doing the dual boot and install XP first or repair the MBR now and try to boot, then install XP and fix it again?

8 Reply by gedakc

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

My preference is to always make sure one OS is working prior to installing the second.  :-)

9 Reply by cul8er

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

gedakc wrote:

My preference is to always make sure one OS is working prior to installing the second.  :-)

My thought also!  And already had the Vista recovery disk made and have now booted into vista 4 times now, without any issues.   As I mentioned in the first post of this thread, "I first used a UBS drive to clone Vista and the HP Recovery", actually I used ImgBurn to transfer it to the UBS drive, just in case I had a big problem.  So as of now, this is Solved and I thank you and class413 for your help!

10 Reply by gedakc

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Re: "SOLVED" GParted and now I'm Lost

Glad to hear this is solved.  cool

To mark this post as solved, edit the first post and place [SOLVED] at the front of the post.