[fgasper]

So, I needed to delete an NTFS partition and expand another to take up the freed space. Easy, right - slap gparted onto a CD and go.

It would do its thing, but then the chkdsk when Windows started back up would just restore the two uncombined partitions exactly as they were.

So, eventually I went into Windows and manually deleted the old partition. Then I formatted it in reiserfs, just to be sure, then deleted that partition, and expanded the original. Still no go; Windows would only recognize the original size of the still-extant NTFS partition.

So then I said, well, maybe a defrag will help. So I defrag'ed a couple times and got a nice contiguous-looking NTFS partition. Went into gparted (which still thought the NTFS partition was a bigger, expanded version of itself), shrunk the partition by a bit, then expanded it a bit. It rebooted, ran chkdsk, and when it got to step 3 of 3 (security descriptors), it up and rebooted again.

Ever since, I get UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME when Windows tries to boot. Worse yet, when I throw in an XP CD, XP will not even recognize that a drive is there.

Stranger still, Linux (i.e. gparted CD) will not only recognize the ntfs partition, but will MOUNT it and READ it. It does throw an error if I try to resize again, though.

I would think it’s boot code that just needs to be rewritten, but when even the XP CD won’t recognize the drive???

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...which is to say, I can’t get to chkdsk, because the XP CD doesn’t even think there is a hard drive there, though when I boot to the hard drive, XP does begin to load until we get to the blue screen of UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

[fgasper]

...which is to say, I can’t get to chkdsk, because the XP CD doesn’t even think there is a hard drive there, though when I boot to the hard drive, XP does begin to load until we get to the blue screen of UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

[piper]

Does BIOS read the drive correctly?

[SRX660]

Welcome to Geeks To Go, fgasper.

This sound's like you want to install Windows XP on the computer.

What i would do here is download the set of Hard drive utilities from the makers website and use it to write all "0"s(Zero's) to the drive. Look in your computer to see who made your hard drive. Then look on their website for the tools. Western digital's is called Data Lifeguard, Maxtor's is called Maxblast, and Seagate's is called Seatools. There will be instructions on the website on how to use the tools. This will get rid of any partition information on the drive. You can then either partition and format the drive the way you like with the HD makers utility or let the Microsoft CD partition and format before installing.

Western Digital Data Lifeguard

Maxtor Maxblast - http://www.maxtor.co...p;downloadID=57

Seagate

If for some strange reason you still cannot partition , format and install windows on the drive there is a microsoft boot floppy program that will make a set of 6 boot floppies for XP. You should be able to fix the HD up this way if you have a floppy drive in the computer. Also double check that all the floppies work. I have made sets that had a bad floppy in the set. Making a second set of floppys with the same program gave me a good set of floppies.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994

SRX660

[fgasper]

I have about 50 GB of data that I want to *keep* in the partition. At least 32 GB that I would need to backup before blowing away the current install.

I should have added: my setup is a RAID-1 (mirror) array of two 160 GB Serial ATA drives. I am not sure of the manufacturer of the drives; it’s a Dell desktop, but I’m at work now so I can’t check.

The BIOS detects both drives, and both have passed diagnostics as of this morning.

[fgasper]

Also, thank you to those who have (already!) replied thus far.

[fgasper]

Fixed. It was a RAID issue; apparently the drives had gotten out of sync. The magical step was disconnecting one of the drives, letting the RAID array have one of them boot normally, then activating the other. It booted, and Windows did a RAID sync.

All is well. Huzzah!