Resizing Partitions

[soaringthor]

So funny story... 4 MB of unallocated space showed up today. Here was what my drive looked like.
<Dell Diags (tiny)> unallocated space (4MB) <Dell Recovery(5/10 GB used> <Vista (40/80 GB used> <XP 50/60 GB used)>
I also am not using Vista near as much as XP, and the Recovery Partition never changes. So I did three things, all at once (using GParted from a Ubuntu LiveCD).
1) Moved Dell Recovery to the left, getting rid of the unallocated space. Then I shrunk it to 6GB.
2) Moved Vista to fill the space left by the Recovery partition, and shrunk it to about 50 GB. (It's practically a fresh install, but Windows.old is taking up like 40 GB. ugh.
3) Moved XP to the left to fill the space left by the Vista partition, and expanded it to fill the rest of the drive.

GParted finished up after only 6 hours. I finished my game of Yahtzee and rebooted, into the XP partition. But I recieved a message that NTLDR couldn't be found. Tried getting into Vista, auto-reboot back to the POST screen. So, I did three things.
1) Ran Vista Startup Repair from the Vista OS CD.
2) Booted into Vista
3) Used EasyBCD to delete the previous entry for XP and created a new one.
I was then able to boot into XP (cancelling the four prompts for a chkdsk).

I know that 1) caused 2). But, which of the 3 caused XP to boot? I guess this isn't a problem with EasyBCD, just curiosity.

Also, when running Startup Repair, it said the problem was a damaged BCD, and that the entry was pointing to an invalid location. It said that it would replace the bad entry with three entries: Vista (recovered) {C:}, Windows Pre-boot Environment {D:}. and Windows Pre-Boot Environment {E:}. But when I rebooted, the Boot Manager just showed Vista (Recovered) and what seemed to be my old entry for XP. Was this XP's copy of EasyBCD kicking in, or was it just a fluke by Startup Repair?

Thanks!

 

[PC eye]

If you originally used the partitioning tool found in XP or Vista finding 1-8mb of unallocated drive space is typical. All you had to do was simply enlarge one of the partitions to see that filled in not go through a rearrangement of the entire drive.

Moving partitions anyone? 6hrs. sounds about right since it's a slowwww... process to start with. Tnen the boot.ini file for XP still points to .... oops! partition no longer seen at...? That rdisk(0)partition(1) is now rdisk(0)partition(0). You may have even seen the "invalid boot.ini file" message when going to load XP there.

The Vista(recovered) is normal when using the automatic startup repair tool. The new entry created for XP is simply an entry without an DS attached. The EasyBCD tool by itself won't see XP added into Vista's own bootloader with XP going on last on it's own.

First you have to correct the boot up problem generally performed at the recovery console with the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands used there to see new boot information written after first logging onto the installation detected. Once XP is booting normally again you reuse the Vista startup repair again and then try creating a new entry with the EasyBCD tool.