1 Topic by jlindley (edited by jlindley 2010-01-09 03:16:58)

  • jlindley
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Topic: [SOLVED] NTFS Resize Problem

"Current NTFS volume size is bigger than the device size!"

Arggggg!

Ok, so here is my story:

I used Gparted a week or two ago, so shrink the partition on my 1tb data drive by around 100 gb. That seemed to work fine. Then today, I decided to shrink my Windows XP partition (on a different, 500gb disk) also. After I shrunk the Windows partition, XP would not boot (blue screen half way through) - so I went back in to GParted, and saw the error message about volume/device size - I then Googled my way here.

Stupidly, I attempted to have a go at fixing this using the Windows Recovery Console, I ran the fixboot and fixmbr commands. The effect that had, was to stop Windows from even trying to boot, now I just get the "NTLDR Is Missing" error message. Another sideaffect of those commands, is that the drive shows up in GParted as being formatted as fat16.

So, I have 2 disks, one has the 'pure' problem. The other has the problem combined with my messing things up even further using the Windows tools.

The loss of the data and the Windows installation on the 500gb disk, would be extremely inconvinient and annoying. The loss of the data on the 1tb disk would be a catastrophe - so at least I didn't mess around with anything further on the larger disk.

So, any help would go a long way.

Here are photographs of the output for:

fdisk -l -u

http://joesart.org/DSC_0003.JPG

parted /dev/sdX unit s print

http://joesart.org/DSC_0004.JPG




Please help! Please!!

Sincere thanks,

Joe


EDIT:

From reading the other forum posts, it seems important to have copies of the mbr and pbr to be able to fix this at all. I'm having trouble mouting a USB drive on the GParted live CD though, can someone give me some pointers? Cheers. (and a happy new year)

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: [SOLVED] NTFS Resize Problem

Regarding recovering your data, some users have reported success mounting the NTFS file system while booted into single user mode in GNU/Linux.

As for mounting the USB drive, the following documentation includes such instructions:
Saving Details for Bug Reports

3 Reply by jlindley (edited by jlindley 2010-01-09 03:21:21)

  • jlindley
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Re: [SOLVED] NTFS Resize Problem

gedakc wrote:

Regarding recovering your data, some users have reported success mounting the NTFS file system while booted into single user mode in GNU/Linux.

As for mounting the USB drive, the following documentation includes such instructions:
Saving Details for Bug Reports

Thanks  gedakc. The instructions for mounting the USB drive are perfect.

Regarding my errors, I started to think that the fix wouldn't be simple, due to my messing around with Microsoft's fixboot and fixmbr, so recovered my data using an NTFS utility with a view to then formatting the drives and going forward. Before I did that, I experimented with TestDisk, and that successfully rewrote my MBR and recovered both PBRs as well. Then I still had an issue with the NTLDR, but re-running fixboot from the Windows XP recovery console resolved that. So now, everhing appears resolved.

Many thanks for your help, and for GParted.

Cheers,
Joe

4 Reply by gedakc

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Re: [SOLVED] NTFS Resize Problem

It is good to hear that you were able to solve the problem.  And thanks also for editing the initial post and prefixing the title with "SOLVED".  smile