Windows 7 not booting after resizing partitions from Fedora 15 live cd

[tirant]

Ok,

Here is the short version of my story:

500GiB disk on laptop. Two Windows 7 partitions, 250GiB each.

I boot F15 live cd, and I proceed to installation after resizing the second windows partition. It gives me back an error about problem with NTFS filesystem. So I try with first partition. Same error.

I boot back into Windows 7, but I only get a fast bluescreen and a reboot after it asking me to check fixing options. I try everything from the Windows 7 fixing options but it doesnt work.

I boot back into Fedora and I see that It resized both of the partitions and ****ed up the NTFS partition table or something, so Im not able to boot into Windows 7 again.

Big problem: it is my girlfriends laptop, and I needed some fedora for a job interview, and she needed it for some important documents. Now both of us are ****ed up

I have looked for similar problems on google but couldnt find an answer that applied to my problem.

testdisk information:

TestDisk 6.12, Data Recovery Utility, May 2011
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sda - 500 GB / 465 GiB - CHS 60801 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

 1 * FAT32 LBA                0  32 33  1274 241 55   20480000 [PQSERVICE]

Bad sector count.
Error: size boot_sector 478148608 > partition 348160000
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
 2 P HPFS - NTFS           1274 241 56 22946 231  5  348160000
 2 P HPFS - NTFS           1274 241 56 22946 231  5  348160000

Bad relative sector.
Error: size boot_sector 478140416 > partition 348160000
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
 3 P HPFS - NTFS          31038  82 21 52710  71 33  348160000
 3 P HPFS - NTFS          31038  82 21 52710  71 33  348160000

Bad relative sector.

And now... any tips on how can i fix that mess?

Thanks a lot in advance

[glennzo]

I don't have a direct answer to your question. The first thing I would do is boot a live cd and recover any and all critical Windows data before things get worse. Once the data is safe I'd turn my attention to the partition issue.

[tirant]

Thanks, That is my idea, but first i need to get some resources to do it. I dont have any external memory options right now... And at the moment Fedora cannot mount my NTFS partitions. The files seem to be there, at least i can see them through testdisk... but nothing else.

[kkshethin]

Repair your windows first by its installation cd

[tirant]

Originally Posted by kkshethin

Repair your windows first by its installation cd

I would have tried that, but we dont have the Windows 7 installation disk anymore. We are short in resources right now

[tirant]

Ok, i just fixed the problem.

I used testdisk to fix the partition size. After it, Windows 7 started smoothly again

What this, sadly, has showed to me, is that I cannot trust Fedora Installer at all.

Windows 7 is most common operating system in todays PCs, and not being able to resize a partition correctly and having the consequence of leaving W7 unoperating is something that should not be tolerated on a quality product like Fedora. So Bug report, here I come.

[glennzo]

I had no problem multi booting with Windows 7, Fedora, other Redhat based distros, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Resizing should be done using Windows partition tools. Create empty unformatted space and let the Fedora installer do the formatting.

[tirant]

Originally Posted by glennzo

I had no problem multi booting with Windows 7, Fedora, other Redhat based distros, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Resizing should be done using Windows partition tools. Create empty unformatted space and let the Fedora installer do the formatting.

I have no problem either, but I had, as you did, to resize partitions from within Windows itself. But the Fedora installer shouldnt allow the user to mess up with NTFS partitions if it is not able to do it right.

[stoat]

It don't really know what went on here. Nevertheless, from the moment that resize option appeared in Anaconda a few versions ago, I was not interested in it and never used it. I consider resizing a partition that contains an operating system to be a sort of risky undertaking even in the best circumstances and never attempt it before making a thorough tested backup to an alternate medium. Not only that, but I always work through a bunch of housekeeping steps to reduce the size of the system in the partition to be shrunk (e.g., delete junk and no-longer-needed files, clear browser caches and cookies, clear Macromedia cookies, compact email folders, manually clear old logs and the many temp folders in Windows, etc.). Then, if it's Windows, I defrag the thing sometimes several times. So I thought to myself, how can Anaconda offer to do such a thing as shrink a partition so matter-of-factly when I take it so seriously and exert so much preparatory effort before doing it? Well, maybe it shouldn't.