Bad Situation - Vista Partition is hosed?? Trying to resurrect.

captainkwe · 03-11-2009, 11:51 AM

Environment

AMD 64 2.8g FX Dual
ASUS M2N-E- SLI
4 GIG RAM
HD1 (SATA) Western Dig. Raptor - 140 gig.
2 other HDs on pATA

Dual Boot on the same HD1:
Vista SP1 - HD1 (rougly 95 gig)
XP SP2 - HD1 (roughly 38gig )
Unallocated (6 Gig)
Partition Master v3.02

A lot of this is from memory as I can’t see my Vista OS Partition any more. It’s a dual boot environment; I was trying to gain space in my Vista drive and shrink my Rarely used XP partition.

I used the ‘built in’ Vista partitioning to "shrink" my 45gig XP installation on HD1. That was successful. I then was left with 6 gig 'unallocated' that I was not able to recover using Vista's partitioning tools (ie enlarge Vista was greyed out). I then used EASUS Partition Master on my Vista partition to increase Vista’s partition using the available 6 gigs of unallocated space. Partition Master rebooted & a DOS like status screen came up and the process began- it was slow - so I left it. Several hours later, I came back and the computer was completely off. I booted the computer, and literally, nothing happened (monitor was in “no signal” state). However, after booting, the disk light was constantly on – which I found odd since the computer had been completely off but still had no signal to the monitor. I left it like this for a while and after another ½ hour, I rebooted. Now, when I am offered the standard “Windows Boot Manager” and choose “MS Windows Vista” I receive a “Windows failed to start. A recent hw or sw change might be the cause – to fix: 1) Insert CD 2) choose Languge 3) click repair.
File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000225
Info: the selected entry could not be loaded b/c the app is missing or corrupt.

I am able to choose and get into my XP install. When I go into XP, and select the drive Vista was on, I get a “Disk is not formatted – do you want to format it?”

Meanwhile, back at the Vista DVD recovery (Windows RE) – when I choose “Startup Repair” and run diagnostics/repair, I get a
“Root Cause Found:
The partition table does not have valid system partition.
Repair Action: Partition Table repair
Result: Completed successfully. Error Code 0x0
Time taken = 4976 ms

So it should be all good, right? NO…..same error as above:
“Windows failed to start
File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000225
Info: the selected entry could not be loaded b/c the app is missing or corrupt.

I’ve run this on the recovery console like 5 times already and each time, it reports a successful Partition Table repair.

Finally, I tried the following with Vista Boot DVD:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /RebuildBcd

and results are as follows:

test with bootrec /fixmbr = the command has completed successfully
test with bootrec /fixboot = element not found
tets with bootrec /RebuildBcd = scanning all disks for windows installation.
please wait, sine this may take a while...
successfult scanned windows installations.
total identified windows installations: 0

the operation completed successfully.

Same state as beginning (Status: 0xc0000225 error) and boot manager startup screen.

While I do have a backup, it will be a painful exercise (thanks again M$!)

One final note - in Computer Mgmt - G:\ drive (where vista lives - shows 95gigs and "Healthy"

Any ideas on how I can a) restore Vista b) "browse this area to snag files if "a" doesn't work?

MANY Thanks for any insight

captainkwe · 03-11-2009, 12:04 PM

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