error reading disk

V

vacaloca

Member
Hi all,


I have this awful and well known issue, after shrinking a Vista partition using GParted. The thing is that I've read numerous posts, blogs articles and what not (including Recovering the Vista Bootloader from the DVD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki ) but nothing seems to work. NOTHING.

I am kind of running out of options here and I would hate to format and reinstall vista (which is the ONLY option the Vaio restore partition gives me).

Just to give a little background, when I shrunk my partition with GParted, it created an unallocated space between the recovery partition (hidden) and the original Vista one, of about 7MB, (I think GParted does this to match some cylinders or something). Could this be the problem of it all? Could it be that the BPB is not pointing to the right direction for loading the MBR?

The Vista Recovery tool says everything is working perfectly, of course, but nevertheless I am unable to load the SO. Once in the recovery console I can see all my files and data in the C: drive so I dont think this is a broken-HD issue (unless of course the MBR sector is broken??)

I am completely out of ideas (and luck) and no solution seems to be working right now. I also tried extending my Vista partition to use all available space again, and once more it didn't work. It's that little 6MB in the middle!.

Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome.
Regards
AB
 
It was an "error reading disk" error at CPU start. Just that.

As it turned out, GParted created a "buffer" partition between my Recovery and Vista partitions but it didn't fix the MBR to point to the VISTA partition, so the MBR was pointing to the "buffer" partition. I guess it is a GParted bug or something.
 
Are you using an old copy of GPartEd ?
Vista aligns partitions using the latest standards, designed for v. large HDDs which don't match those used on previous smaller generations of HDDs.
Older partitioning software can do great damage to anything partitioned with the new standards.
 
I am using the latest version of GParted, downloaded from the official download page. And my notebook is pretty new too, so I don't think it is a Vista version thing.

I mentioned that I thought it was a bug in GParted, but it was just a guess; I am not saying it actually is.

The actual thing is that for some reason I can't explain, after using GParted my machine refused to boot and in order to fix it I had to manually edit the MBR with a hex editor, and point it to the new start of the Vista Partition.

Regards
VL
 
Its perfectly fine in situations such as this. :smile:
Congrats to the guys over at the Gparted forums, btw. They helped solve a NST member's problem before we could get a chance to. :brows:

Cheers, and let us know if you have any more trouble with anything, and we will do our best to help you solve it. Feel free to stick around, and make regular posts.

Jake
 
Back
Top