Free Cookies for Linux & Windows

One
of the more advanced options for resizing your Windows
Vista partition is to use the GParted Live CD, a
bootable
linux CD that takes you straight into GParted, the great linux utility
for managing partitions. The problem is that if you resize your
boot/system partition, you will be completely unable to boot without
repairing windows.

First make sure that you have a bootable Windows Vista
installation
DVD, as you will be unable to use your computer if you don’t. Next,
download the GParted
Live CD and burn it to cd.

Boot off the GParted cd, and you will see your hard drives in
the
drop-down list. The first drive is typically your boot drive, but you
can check the Flags column to make sure.

Next you’ll need to right-click on
the partition and choose Resize/Move from the menu.

Now you can either use the New Size textbox, or just
click and
drag the partition to make it smaller (or bigger). When you are done,
click the Resize/Move button.

This doesn’t immediately apply the changes, though. You can
make
other changes to your partitions and then when you are finished click
the Apply button.

Depending on the amount of data and the speed of your
computer, it
can take quite a while to resize the partitions. On my computer it took
more than 30 minutes.

Once it’s done, quit, remove the live cd and then
reboot your
computer. Unless you are very lucky, you’ll be greeted with this
horrible error message saying “Windows Failed to start. A recent
hardware or software change might be the cause.”

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000225
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is
missing or corrupt.

Here’s a screenshot of the error, but don’t worry, we’ll fix
it.

Insert your Windows Vista installation dvd and make sure you
boot off it. At the welcome screen click the Next button.

On the next screen, click the “Repair your computer” link in
the lower left hand corner.

The system recover options dialog will show up, and will ask
you if you want to Repair and restart, which we do.

If you happened to click the View details link you’ll see that
the
error is “Windows Device: Partition=Not found”, which indicates the
problem is the partition that we resized.

Your computer will reboot, and you’ll see Windows Vista in the
list
although it now has a different name indicating that it was recovered.

When Vista first starts up, it will start running a check of
the
disk. Whatever you do, don’t hit any keys here because we want the
system to check the disk.

Once it’s done it will reboot, and you’ll have Vista back up
and running again!

If you want to rename the Windows Vista entry in the list back
to normal, you can use VistaBootPro

This movie is not good!