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Windows XP wont boot up after merging of system partition and storage one, have failed with an error

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Acronis DD11
Windows XP, SP2
80 GB hdd, with 4 partitions.

What happened?

I wanted to merge all 4 partition into one, so i started to do it one by one.
There ware 2 almost empty partitions and merge between them went good.
Then i tried to merge new one with one that was almost full. Error occurred during the merging process so i have left with some strange partitions of 200+ mbs and one big. As i had data backup i decided to format them and then merge them again and merge passed without errors this time.

Then it was time for tricky part. I needed to merge last partition (System) with the rest of free space.
Error occurred during the merge and as of that moment I'm unable to boot up my system!

While i scheduled partitions for merging I didn't receive single warning, so, logically, I thought that merge will be piece of cake, easy and quick !!!

Now i have messed up system (actually when I putted the windows XP setup CD into drive and started setup procedure, I realized that state of the new partition was something like UNKNOWN) so i pretty much need to do clean install of the OS now and hope that after I install Norton Ghost, it will able to recover my Windows backup.

If not, Im pretty much stuck for a week as there are so many important applications and software need to be installed and some of them are quite tricky to configure and stuff...

How can someone from Acronis staff, explain to me, how the hell this happened???
It suppose to be easy manageable, only few clicks solution for hdds.

0 Users found this helpful

Dean,

Unless you've already done it don't perform a complete re-install of XP.

It sounds as though the MBR or partition table have changed or possibly where boot.ini looks for the Windows boot files they've moved.

Put the XP CD in and select the command line option - at the command line type in dir/w see if any file or folder names appear. If the install CD asks you to log onto a system then put in your Windows Administrator password, if you get to the command prompt again, then your Windows files are still intact, well some of them anyway.

If you can't get that far, then you can try one of the following.

If you've made a DD11 Rescue CD run that and see what it reveals of your disk structure.

If you just want to get going, then you could try booting from the XP CD, select Install and then wait for the RECOVERY option to appear, if it doesn't appear then don't do anything else just yet, but try and run the DD11 CD and report back what it shows.

Assuming you do get to the Recovery option, then select this, the installer will then delete all the Windows system files and registry information, and re-install it as well as making a new MBR. On reboot XP will allow you to log on, all your programs will still be there.

However, if on the partitions you merged contained program files, these programs won't run as XP registry will still be looking for them using the old partition letters. You will either have to re-install them or laboriously search through registry and alter the partition letters.

Documents etc will be OK .

Any major playing with the system partition should ideally be started form the DD11 Rescue CD so that Windows isn't invloved in any way.

An Entire Disk Image backup should also be created before making partitioning changes, especially when using the Merge or Split options of DD. Hopefully, you were able to restore your image.