Skip to main content

Unable to start Windows 7 after resizing a partition. Please help

Thread needs solution

Hello,

I have a single hard-disk with two partitions: C and D drives. I was running out of disc space in C drive so I decided to use Acronis Disk Director Home 11 to shrink the partition for D drive and extend C drive with the space freed up from D drive. I chose to free up space from the start of D drive so that the space is adjacent to C drive. I started the operation which required a reboot. Then the resize operation started and finished without any errors. However, now Windows will not start. When I reboot, the screen says Windows is starting but then it opens in safemode like mode with Startup Repair window. Startup repair checks for solutions but in the end it says that Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically. When I look at the problem details, I see Problem Signature 7: CorruptFile. I am able to open up the command prompt via one of the system recovery options and I see X drive.

X:\windows\system32

Where did this X drive come from?

I can go to drive C but there is nothing in there. There is also D and E drives. D seems to be my old C drive and E is my old D drive.

What can I do here? Any ideas?
Thanks.

Mehmet

0 Users found this helpful

Mehmet:

X: is a Ramdisk that the Windows 7 recovery environment sets up when it runs.

When you are running the recovery environment, drive letters will be assigned differently than when you're running the full version of Windows 7. The active partition (Windows 7 System Reserved partition) will be assigned C:, the next primary partition (your main Windows partition) will be D:, and your data partition will be E:, so what you are seeing is normal. There should be some files in your C: partition but you may need to type dir /a to see them. You should see the file bootmgr and the folder boot.

The error message probably means that you need to run chkdsk to fix a corrupt file. Most likely, the corrupt file is on the main Windows 7 partition. So try the following:

1. Reboot into the recovery environment again.
2. Start a command prompt
3. Change to the Windows 7 drive (D:)
4. Run chkdsk /f
5. See what kinds of errors are detected and possibly fixed
6. Try rebooting into Windows again

Hopefully, chkdsk will be able to fix any problems with corrupt files.