[SOLVED] Troubles when resizing VISTA using the GParted LiveCd on Acer

Note: threads on this topic seem to be rather old and FAQ does not cover my specific problem, so here is a new thread.

Recently (begin of May 2008) I bought an Acer Aspire L5100 I. It comes with Vista installed and two nicely sealed recovery DVDs, but no Vista DVD.

To get some space to toy around I wanted to rearrange partitions. First I tried the vista disk management, which is able to shrink partitions, but not as much as I would like and it can't move them. That would have been fine with me, but I was not able to create partitions in both of the empty gaps in the disk layout. When trying to create a partition for the second gap I got some nondescript message saying something like "a drive has insufficient space for this operation".

I'm not familiar with disk partitioning, so I was hesitant to try a third party tool. But a friend recommended Gparted, so I had a look at it using the latest live CD.

The first thing learned when trying the same operations with Gparted: I can't have more than 4 "real" partitions and there were already 3 partitions on the disk, one for drive C, another one for drive D and in front of them about 20G labeled something like PQService, i.e. a recovery partition. Shrinking partitions C and D left me with two gaps and no way to use both.

So finally I decided to try moving partition D. This went smooth, except that Vista lost the assignment of the drive letter. This was easily fixed with a few clicks in the vista disk manager.

Then I decided Vista should be content with a 40G partition (instead of 70G or such). But the Vista tool didn't allow to shrink that much. So I boldly decided to use Gparted to shrink the partion (but not to move it). I was told that I may need a Vista DVD to repair, but hey, I have recovery DVDs and a recovery partition to return to factory settings, don't I?

Then my trouble started. Firstly Gparted did move the partition a few blocks to the left, even though I didn't touch the front region. Some kind of rounding problem?

The next reboot got me into a Vista repair screen. Note that I didn't insert a Vista DVD. It seems the recovery partition is some kind of emergency boot section? Whatever, the repair failed, failed again, again and again.

Next thing I discovered was: my recovery CDs are empty. "Blank Recovery DVD" does NOT mean I can recover from a blank system! Ups, why didn't the Acer system or the Acer docs tell me that?

Then I found out how to activate the 'restore to factory settings' using Alt-F10. Next surprise: this didn't work either, giving a nondescript error message "Restore Failed - reason 0xa0000001. No info about this reason on the Acer pages or on the internet. Veeery funny! Earlier I got an error message about a missing language file. This and typos in the GUI gave me the impression that Acer is not taking recovery very serious.

I fiddled around some more hours, but got nowhere.

The next day I found someone with a Vista DVD to borrow and tried again. I just got into the same auto-repair dialogs that failed in the beginning, and they failed just the same as right after the resize.

Not funny!

When the Vista repair fails often enough, I was allowed again to select advanced repair option. There I started a command shell and recollected what I know about command line level handling of Windows. My first hope was to be able to start up the windows disk manager, maybe with something like compmgmt.msc. But all I found was a command line utility called "diskpart.exe", which fortunately has a help function. After a while I figured it out and was able to see that the emergency Windows was running in drive X, the resized partition did not have a drive letter assigned and C was assigned to something that seemed to be the card reader device.

Finally I theorized that somehow Vista failed to see that the second partition on the disk is the partition to repair and may have tried to fix the card reader instead, saying "No OS Files" in the details of the attempted fix. Pretty silly theory, but then software bugs are silly most of the time. So I used diskpart.exe to reassign drive letters, i.e. removed C from the chip reader and assigned it to the Vista partition. For good measure I did the same with D. Then I exited the command shell and (without doing a reboot!) started auto-repair again from the GUI.

Then I rebooted for the 1001st time and finally Vista was back with a disk check (no errors found) and up and running again.

Hope this helps someone.