Big problem after resizing partition

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I keep a relatively small C: for easy backup, but over the years it has filled up little by little. I tried to run Turbo Tax and it said there was insufficient space on the drive. I keep all programs on D and data on E: But Turbo Tax doesn’t give any options, it has to use C:, so I tried to re-size. I used the Power Suite from Spotmau, booting off their CD which I have used before without any problems, but in order to increase C: I had to make D: smaller. Well that took quite a while but it seemed to go okay. Then I tried to re-size C: but it wouldn’t let me. I could reduce it further, but not make it bigger even though there was 15GB of unallocated space right after C:.

I ran the resizing program again to restore the D: to what I’d started with. That seemed to complete okay, at least the drive map showed C: and D:. Since I hadn’t touched C, and I have another partition manager, Easus, I decided to reboot and start over. Nothing happened, just a black,
blank screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner. Now I was worried!

I tried to boot off a Win XP SP3 CD. That whirrs away for a while then ends in a blue screen:

“A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down… blah blah blah Check your hard drive… Run chkdsk /f…”

Tried it again with the same result. I didn’t see any way of running chkdsk. However, I have a Bootit image, all I had to do was restore it. Right? Wrong. Bootit could not restore the image because the partitions were too small, both C: & D:.

So I booted with an Easus boot CD. Using this program the map of the drive is quite different. It shows a primary partition of 6GB with no drive letter, just an *: 18GB Unallocated: Logical C: of 156GB (this is what used to be D Logical D: 46GB (this used to be E.

I accept that there will be no magic bullet to restore the status quo, but how do I get the * partition and unallocated space to become C: again? And change the drive letters from C and; D to D and E? Also I have some images I’d like to recover from the original E:. They should all be there as this partition has not changed at all.

Any suggestions very much appreciated.

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Hi Rhino, Read This.

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Was the original C partition, 6 GB?

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Kind of late for a response, but:

It sounds as if your original C partition was a primary partition, while D and E were logical partitions. This means that when you reduced the size of D, even if it moved the start of it to a higher disk address (to make room before it for an expanded C) the start of the EXTENDED partition (the container which holds all logical partitions) ALSO would have to be moved before C could be expanded (though one might think that a good partition manager would do this automatically).

I’m not familiar with Power Suite, so have no idea how good (or bad) it may be. At any rate, since you have EASEUS I’d suggest using it to scan the disk for ‘lost’ partitions to try to get an idea of just what state the disk was left in. With such information it may be repairable, or if not you should at least be able to repartition it such that the Bootit images can be restored.

Good luck.

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You make an interesting point, Bill, one I haven’t needed to think about for some years: Primary DOS partitions vs ‘Logical’ drives contained within an ‘extended’ partition. I have avoided the whole issue by using only Primary DOS partitions, for which FDISK is simply inadequate. We can use GDISK or another utility -Partition Magic is one – to create up to 4 of these per physical drive. Rhino may have to backup his D: and E: partitions, i.e. to images on external media, then completely rebuild the partitioning scheme and restore the respective images.

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