Uh Oh...When Computers Won't Boot

Another reason to love Linux.

I was working on a system in the lab today that was having some problems with a bit of software that was working fine, now wasn't.

I ran updates on it. Checked the hard disk. The usual.

discovered that the drive was seen in Windows XP as 20 gig, but the drive was actually 40 gig. Most likely this was an artifact from the system being imaged; the partition information given to Windows made it seem like a 20 gig drive so Windows wasn't properly seeing the entire disk.

So in the course of repair I took out my RIPLinux...Recovery Is Possible, although I thought it used to be called Rescue Is Possible... CD and booted to X Windows. The disc runs entirely in memory so you can use it for a variety of diagnostic and repair procedures on systems. A wonderful tool for any tech repairing computers.

Once in X I ran gparted from the partition tools menu. This gives a graphical menu of your disks and gives options for various alterations that can be made, among them resizing the partition. Because of a glitch in the way the partitioning was done gparted saw that the drive was already set as one partition taking up the entire 40 gig. I just told it to resize the disk to slightly less than 40 gig...better than the 20 it was already set to. Best of all is that this is a non-destructive resize (I'd still advise a backup, though)...resize the partition, and the data is still intact.

Clicked Apply and the changes went off without a hitch. Rebooted, Windows started...and rebooted itself. And rebooted itself. And rebooted itself. Uh-oh.

Information was still there because Windows started to boot. I stuck in the RIPLinux CD again and booted to X. This time I ran Testdisk. This is a utility that greatly helps in searching for lost data, partitions, errors, etc. and is a boon for recovering data from drives, but any tool for playing with partitions isn't child's play. One of the basic scans popped up telling me that the geometry on the drive was set to 16 heads but looked like it should be 255. I dropped through another couple menus to reset that information, told Testdisk to write the data to the disk, and rebooted.

Windows XP booted right up for me.

Yay, Linux!

This is by far not the first time I've fixed quirky and archaic and deep-level problems with Linux boot CD's and no doubt this won't be the last. Although this was the first time that resizing a partition triggered this kind of problem. I've seen this several times from cloning and duplication errors, especially switching drive brands and types...but never resizing on the same disk that I can recall. Goes to show that every task has its own challenges, I suppose.