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Topic: unable to boot system after partition move

Hi, I'm new here so a big HELLO to all. I hope you are all doing good!

First of all I do apologise if this question has been asked and answered  many times before.

I have a dell inspiron 15r-se 7520. My disk has 2 partitions. One for Windows 10 and one for file storage. There was unallocated space before the windows  partition. I wanted to move the windows partition to the left and have the unallocated space after windows to the right at the end of the disk. I used gparted and asked it to move the windows partition to the left and have the unallocated space after it. It showed to be doing just that. However 20 mins before it was due to finish my laptops screen went black and the caps lock key started to flash on and off. I left it for an hour to just get on with the job. After the hour the hard drive led had stopped flashing and the computer seemed to be doing nothing. It would not respond to anything. I left it for another 30 mins and still nothing. I turned it off and rebooted into gparted which said all operations have completed. However there was a yellow triangle warning sign next to the windows partition. I clicked it and it told me that the partition had unallocated space in it. It recommended me to run a check which would repair the error. It completed. I now have a windows partition (no warning triangle) that has merged with the unallocated space and my system will not boot. I have tried windows startup repair and recovery console even wrote a new mbr/bootloader/Fixmbr and fixboot using bootrec. Still won't boot. I'm currently running chkdsk /r. Any ideas what I could try after that or do you think ill have to try to recover the partition. If so what recovery software would you recommended? I have pretty much the majority of the leading software company's tool available to me.

I hope you got all that and could understand me ok.

I would be extremely grateful to anyone who has the time to help me.

Many thanks in advance. smile

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Re: unable to boot system after partition move

From your post it would appear that you have already tried to restore Windows boot.  If "chkdsk /f /r" finished and you are still not able to boot, then I think the next step would be to recover the data.

Have you tried to mount the partition and copy the data from the file system?

If that works then it would be easier than using data recover tools like photorec.

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Re: unable to boot system after partition move

Hi gedakc,

Many thanks for your reply.

Yup... tried all restore options available and chkdsk.

I took a gamble and removed the HDD and connected it to another machine which works and booted into windows and Active @ Un-delete to scan for partitions. It found it and I restored the partition to the un-allocated space on the same HDD and marked it as active. Put HDD back into Dell Laptop and booted. I got one of the usual boot errors but sorry I cant remember exactly which one it was. That was progress as before it would not even try to boot past black screen and cursor.

After booting from Windows disc tried startup repair again and I'm currently waiting for it to complete. I's been half an hour now. I think because the windows partition has been moved around and re-sized it must be running a full check disk. So hopefully if it is running chkdsk it will eventually finish then boot into windows.

I'm just going to leave it to do what it wants to do and hope it does not take too long. I've had chkdsk running for nearly a day on other machines fixing files and recovering orphaned files etc. It would be helpful is MS configured startup repair to show what its doing rather than just  the Attempting Repairs message. Some people would not care what it was doing and would just wait for it to finish but techies like me like to know anything and everything that's happening. :)

Once again thanks for your reply. I'll post back with the outcome.... eventually. :)

4 (edited by everway9 2016-03-14 21:06:34)

Re: unable to boot system after partition move

I wish gparted forum would not keep asking for the gparted creators name when you post anything. A simple botcheck like enter the verification code you see in the image would do. I find it hard to remember the creators name. smile

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Re: unable to boot system after partition move

BINGO!!!!

Startup repair finished after 45 minutes and said that it could not repair my computer. sad

Error was:

"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause."

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Status: 0xc0000225


After searching the web for the error code I found this:

https://www.vmadmin.co.uk/microsoft/43- … otmgrerror


If you do not want to go to that link here is what it says:

It describes the error code above and that it appeared after after re-sizing a virtual disk for Windows Server 2008.


Not my exact problem I know. However, I read on and did the following after booting to the recovery console:

Ran "bcdedit /enum" to list all the Windows Boot Manager entries. Took note that the device and osdevice is set to unknown.
Ran the following (modifying where needed) to set the correct device partitions.

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:
bcdedit /set {default} device partition=C:
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=C:

Then relisted the entries to check they were correct. (bcdedit /enum)

They were so I exited recovery console and it took a while to boot but eventually it did boot back into Windows and it was as though nothing had ever gone wrong in the first place.

So, thanks to Active @ Un-Delete and the guy who uploaded the Win Server fix I eventually managed to repair the damage I did after using Gparted. I admit that my problem was probably due to something I did but I will not be using Gparted for a while. I'll leave Gparted for people who actually know what they are doing! smile

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Re: unable to boot system after partition move

Thanks everway9 for reporting back with how you resolved the issue.

You can help others searching for answers to similar problems  by editing your initial post and prefixing "SOLVED" in front of the title.