Comments on: Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition

By: Dmitry Ukolov

Dmitry Ukolov — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:52:00 +0000

Hi,
I try to realign boot partition (moved it from 31,5 kb offset) on the Vista Home Premium 64 bit (I have installed SSD disk).
On booting I got the error, as described in article.
I used Vista DVD, it repair the disk (very fast).
But when booting I got BSOD – STOP 0×0000007E, 0xffffffffC0000005… (unhandled exception… Access violation…)
I try leave 1 memory stick (2 Gb) – no effect.
In safe mode I see last line “loaded CRCDISK.SYS”, then after 1 second delay it show BSOD.

I search resolve, but not found.
after 3 hour I moved boot partition back (to 0 offset) – and Vista boot successfuly.

if anybody know, how resolve this problem (or how to define bad driver) – please, help me.

P.S. “round to cylinders” was unchecked

By: brett

brett — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:19:35 +0000

Hey guy, so i was thinkin about using this but i have a question, i have linux on my computer now and want to install vista, i tru and because you have do to a “clean install” you have to deal with partitions, i beleave mine are to small cause it wont let me hit next?? will this thread help? and when doing the repair is it guarenteed to repair it??

Thanks Brett

By: Jon M

Jon M — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:24:20 +0000

PROBLEM SOLVED! I had the whole “round to cylinders” issue which rendered Vista useless – black screen with flashing cursor. However following the instructions above from Ryan D Hatch I was able to fix my system.

Oddly enough though testdisk seemed to think my Vista partition was FAT rather NTFS so before I could fix the boot sector I had to Analyse which correctly detected it as NTFS, label it as primary bootable then rewrite the partition table.

By: simon

simon — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:03:18 +0000

Thanks alot for this, wish it didnt take me so long to find it.

By: Finzl

Finzl — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:15:03 +0000

@Brandon
You need to resize the volume with ntfsresize if your computer shows two different sizes.
Open console and type something ntfsresize -i /dev/hda1 to show your settings, then ntfsresize -s SIZE -n /dev/hda1, where SIZE has to be the size of your device in bytes, to test the volume resizing. If there are no errors, do it without the option -n and it’ll write the correct volume size to the partition table.

By: Dr. Venkmann

Dr. Venkmann — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:37:21 +0000

THEREIS MUCH BAD INFORMATION HERE. I will address only a few.
1) Vista comes with it’s own partition manager that is very competent — if you stick with using it and do not mix Linux-based GParted or the better Partition Magic AFTER you have made 4 primary partitions with Vista. This is critical with SATA hard drives as they cannot have more than 15 partition NUMBERS as opposed to SPACES or VOLUMES. This means you can only have 14 actual physical volumes when using any parition mananger with a SATA drive. This is becasue SATA will allow either 4 primary partitions or 3 primaries annd up to 12 LOGICAL VOLUMES (Linus-speak)or EXTENDED PARTITIONS in Window-speak. The diffferencein terminology is critical here as in theLinux world one partition number istaken up by a – for want of a better phrase – a “boundary line” between primary partitions and logical volumes. So here is exactly what a linux partition table will look likeon a SATA har drive of any size maximized:

Primary Partitions 1,2,3 Whether made by windows or linux these partitions will have actual space allocated to them.
Partition 4 – Made by Windows this partition will have actual volume. Linux can do this too BUT if you want more than 4 partitions and are using a Linux partitioning product Partition 4 will be created more or less as a border that defines the tota; space that the 11Logical Volumes willl be contained.So in SATA Linux speak sda1,2 and 3 are primary partitions wtih actual volume. Sda 4 will be an extended partition that contains all the logical volumesup to the maximum of 11. So there it is; 14 partitions and 15 numbers. Thats all for this time.
Cheers with Linux & Vista,
Dr. Venkmann (Retired)
Canada

By: Anon

Anon — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:07:53 +0000

Sadly enough I did not get it right to extend my Vista boot partition from 31gb(yeah lol its small) to 61 gig(have another free partition on the same hdd)

I do as told…dl the gparted liveCd…burn it…boot from it

Now this is where I encountered my first problems,it doesnt look like the thing as described in the pictures and throws an error(its a cmd window,black and not like in the pics)

Guess I am doomed to reinstall again….setup my itunes again *sigh*

By: tamilsweet

tamilsweet — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:29:45 +0000

I used GParted to create partitions in my Dell Inspiron 1545 with 217GB Partiton.
15GB Recovery partition is left untouched
It took me just 10min to repartition and reboot successfully with Vista.
Resized 217 GB to 60GB
3GB Swap
20GB ext3 – for linux root
20GB ext3 – for linux home
40GB FAT32 – for data storage
72GB FAT32 – for multimedia storage

By: Alexander

Alexander — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:29:42 +0000

Yesterday I did the same procedure as I was not satisfied with the Vista partitioning tool. (Vista only alows to shrink the dirck roughly half the space.) So after playing around with Vista (deleting pagefile.sys etc.) without any better results I look at my pile of free CDs of some computer magazin and found a live Linux which also had GParted on it.

I used GParted and encountered the same error at reboot as you have described. My first idea was to try the autorepair option of Vista and my “recovery” DVD of Vista gave me the option to repair Vista. After one minute it was done. I could not believe it! Everything works! (I have still to check the restore points, though.)

Today I searched on the internet to read whether there might some issues using GParted to repartition my Vista harddisk and I found you page. So I am really happy to see that what I did was good and that there are usually no major sideeffects.

Thanks for the tip and it worked for me! (Although I did not know about beforehand.)

BTW: To copy and shrink my 460 GiB partition 50 GiB used) to 250 GiB took about 1:30 h. To copy and grow my other 450 GiB partition (3 MiB used) to 660 GiB took 4:30 h. So the whole afternoon yesterday was gone with repartitioning the hard disc. Sigh!

Regards

Alexander

By: Dennis Gearon

Dennis Gearon — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:58:18 +0000

@Phlippe Sainte-Marie. I’ll take a look at it, thanks!