1 Topic by Aemaeth

  • Aemaeth
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Topic: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

I have 2 SATA hard drives.  One of them had a ~100g NTFS partition with XP on it and the rest (~130g) was partitioned.  I also had a 320g unpartitioned drive.  My first attempt was to copy the partition to the 320g drive and then resize it to the maximum size.  This resulted in the following error on boot that would not allow me to load the OS:

"A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I attempted several different ways to get this to work, but ultimately decided it may be a problem with the larger HDD.  I then settled on simply resizing the partition on the original drive.  The problem is that now THAT drive gives the same error on boot.  I'm using live 0.3.6.  Any suggestions on how to fix this are appreciated.  I apologize if this has already been covered, I was unable to find a topic that covered this.

2 Reply by class413

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

You don't give details on the operations you oerformed on the hard drives.
I understand that you copied a partition, resized it and tried to boot from there. If so, it wouldn't possible because there was no bootloader at all in the master boot sector.

To resize ntfs partitions, there are rules to follow. It is better to perform one operation at the time and check if anything goes as expected. There was no need to work on the original drive, you could work on the copy, so you could repeat this again and again with no risk.

Anyway, I thing you could try to fix the windows boot using the xp installation cd and booting from there into the recovery console (a recovery screen mode, where you enter commands at the command line). The specific commands are fixmbr and fixboot. Do a search for them in this forum.

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

3 Reply by Aemaeth

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Yes, I've tried all that.  The reason I started using the original drive is because I assumed the second drive was bad.  Let me go over my exact details to see if I can cover what you're looking for.

1. I attempted to copy/paste a partition from drive A to drive B.  I also attempted the resize the partition on the same boot.  I set the boot flag in g-parted then ran fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery console.  Received error.  Tried all those steps again, except did not resize.  Same error.  Ran chkdsk w/ no luck.

At this point, I started to wonder if the problem was with the hard drive I was coping to.  I then chose to just resize the original partition.  That's when I started getting errors on the original hard drive during boot.

Does that give you all the details you were looking for?

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Same error on 2 hard drives wouldn't be a disk error. Please, check the BIOS settings, as well as cables.
I found some ideas, among them to disable "IDE Bus Mastering" in the BIOS setup. Someones suspect a problem with winxp sp2 bootloader.

You can check if the partition is good by accessing it from a live Linux CD like Knoppix, the new Ubuntu etc. If you can access it and the files, then the problem is due to windows only, not to the hardware.

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

5 Reply by Aemaeth (edited by Aemaeth 2008-06-04 21:06:40)

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Yes, I now agree that it's not a disk problem since it happened on a known good disk.  I also agree that it is a problem with the bootloader because I can access the files from other builds.

Here's my question: why did g-parted have an issue with this particular partition so much so that fixmbr and fixboot could not correct it?  Also, how DO I correct it?

I appreciate your help.

EDIT: I just started actually accessing the data on that hard drive and for some reason it says that all the space I added when I resized it is already full of data.  I.E. this doesn't appear to be JUST a bootloader problem....

6 Reply by class413

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Is your xp the older original version? That version didn't support partitions bigger than 128GiB.

Probably the partition was expanded but the filesystem remains the same. You can try to shrink it to the original size, even a few MiB smaller, and repeat the expand operation. You can try this on the new drive.

The right operation order would be to reboot in windows after each step, check the partition and go to the next step: partition copy -> check to be sure that it works in the original size (fix boot if necessary)  -> expand -> check (+ fix boot if necessary).

Another idea is to perform an installation repair from the xp cdrom or installation over the existing installation if it detects the existing  installation.

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

7 Reply by Aemaeth

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Yes, I did all that.  It's a newer version of XP (included SP2) and the CD would recognize the installation.  It sounds like we may need to just chalk this up as a bug.

8 Reply by class413

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Re: Resize and Copy Failure on NTFS

Be more specific, please.
Did you try the repair or re-install from the xp cdrom? Which were the results or messages?
Did you try the inverse resizing and new expand operation with file system check after each step?

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