Windows XP Won't boot after resizing partitions

Jim,

Can you post the contents of the boot.ini file?

Can you also post screenshots of what Disk Management and DD show for the drives?

No error message is displayed?

Thanks for the quick reply MudCrab.

Here is the picture of the boot.ini file. Looks normal to me. I compared it to my other computers.

When I try to open Disk Managment I get an error "Logical Disk Manager" - The service database is locked.
I manually started the Logical Disk Management Service and now can see the Disk Management window.

Here is a screen shot of the Disk Management.
Please remember I purposely hide the other partitions so the computer would boot.

Since the DD program is installed on another partition I can not open it and take a screen shot. I can take a screen shot of DD from another drive, which boots, and is a working image of the same problem. The only difference is the working image can boot up and see all but one of the drives. But I still can not make any type of changes: if I do the computer will not boot. Do you want to see a screen shot of the imaged drive?

Thanks,
Jim

If it's not too much trouble. It may help to see it. For this drive, if you have a digital camera, you could boot to the DD CD and take an picture of the screen.

If you switch to the other drive, please post a screenshot of what Disk Management shows for that one along with the DD screenshot.

Hi Mudcrab,

No it is never too much trouble. I booted up to my DD and Acronis True Image recovery disk. When I booted to DD and tried to use the full version of DD I received the following error: E000101F4: Acronis Disk Director Suite has not found any hard disk drives. I then booted to Acronis TI and it saw all of the drives. Finally I rebooted again and this time I used DD in safe mode and was able to take a picture of the screen. See attached. You already have the screen shot of Disk Management.

May I ask why you have so many partitions?

Have you tried deleting all the partitions and recreating them? This would requiring copying the contents of each partition to another drive. DD can get Logical partitions "out of order" in certain situations. Perhaps that's what's causing the problem.

EDIT: Are you using XP SP3 ?

I have alot of parttion because I categorize my software installs, i.e., web site, photos, utilities. Yes, I am using SP3.

I thought about deleting all partition but isn't hiding them just the same? Or what I could do is back up the C: partition and restore it to a fresh hard drive and try it right?

Actually when I hide all partition and only have the first hard drive running the system will boot. If I then connect a 2nd hard drive with any type of partition on it the system won't boot.

What do you think the next step should be?

Thanks,
Jim

Test it on another drive, if that's not too difficult. Restore C: and make sure Windows is working and then create the Logical partitions in the order they will be on the drive. If everything still boots, try hiding some and see what happens.

Logical partitions are linked together. Windows may be having a problem because of how they are linked.

Are any software programs that Windows needs to run correctly installed on any of the hidden partitions? That could definately cause a problem.

I would recommend you use folders instead of partitions and cut down on the number of partitions. Of course, I don't know your setup so this may not be possible without major changes (reinstalling, etc.). If you still want the actual data to be on different partitions you can still do that -- just mount the partition to a folder instead of a drive letter (do this in Disk Management). Personally, I would just use one partition for software (for example) and create folders for each "separate" item.

I am happy to post all is fixed now. I deleted all other partitions except the C: Drive. Used Disk Management (Not DD) to create the other partitions and placed the data back on each partition. There is still one more issue which I need to troubleshoot. I am not sure whether the issue resides with DD or a drive bay/controller. I will test that once I reimage the drive.

Thanks for all your help MudCrab I owe you one. You pointed me in the right direction when you advised me that all the partitions are linked together. I didn't know how important this was until you told me about it.

Jim