W2K won't boot and stop error

[Absolute Zer0 0]

Ok here's the deal my friend had formatted his harddrive but left 13 Gigs unpartitioned b/c he thought of using Linux but after W2K he didn't. So he wanted to merge the space into the current NTFS partition. He used Partition Magic 5.01 and resized the original from 32 to the full 45 gigs. When it finished he rebooted, he got STOP error 0x0000007B inaccessible_boot_device. He can use recovery console and can see his directories etc. He ran chkdsk /r (like it says in the stop error message) but still it won't boot into the GUI or safe mode only recovery console works. My question is how do we get the GUI working again? Should we run FIXMBR or FIXBOOT? Which first?

 

PS It had been running fine for 6 months but he wanted to recover the lost space. So he would like to avoid reformatting

[JediBaron 0]

Why didn't he just use the Win2k Disk Management to format and add the extra disk space? Sounds like using Partition Magic was mucho overkill.

[MoreLight 0]

JediBaron was right. That was a really bad idea using that Piece of Sh*t utility. All it does is mess up the boot sectors. Partition Magic is for FAT drives barely gets the job done there. It doesn't handle NTFS worth a damn. (don't flame me on this, i've seen a few servers messed up from people trying it..)

 

Win2k disk management is what you needed to convert the drive to a dynamic disk and then convert the unallocated space into another volume. You probably won't have been able to "extend" the other 13 gigs because you started with a "basic" disk.

 

fixmbr: repairs the master boot record of the partition boot sector.

 

fixboot: writes a new partition boot sector onto the "system" partition.

 

I haven't had to use these utilities, but I would back up any critical data, then try "fixboot" first.

 

If you have an ERD disc, I would consider trying that method as well, but I'm not sure which is the best approach. I haven't fubared my drive yet.

[MoreLight 0]

Ok now you can flame me. I meant to say try "fixmbr" first.

 

I hate when that happens 8)