dual boot xp not working after mint installed

[Mint gum]

hi, i partitioned my hard drive (which is a one160gb hd) and gave around 83gb (which was the max i could give) to mint7 and the rest for windows xp. now i tried to go back after a week to xp and it never boots.
did i give to much space to mint?

[RedWagon]

how did you shrink your XP partition?

[Mint gum]

sorry, i shrunk it in mint.

[RedWagon]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think your XP partition is toast. NTFS (the filesystem used by Windows) has the bad habit of sprinkling data all the way to the end of its partitions. Sometimes by defragging a few times you can make it safe to shrink a little, but never all the way. gparted assumes you know what your are doing and lets you shrink it quite far, usually chopping off those extra little bits of data left at the end of the partition. Shrinking ntfs partitions is never considered safe, for future reference back up before you do so and don't shrink it all the way to the end. Ext, the filesystem used by linux, stores all data at the very beginning of the device so it can safely be shrunk. You might be able to mount your NTFS partition in Linux and pull some data off it before you delete it.

[Mint gum]

that is terrible... i only want some videos and some music data back so not a huge loss. how would i go about recovering my data?

tnx

[AK Dave]

Your data has been at least partially overwritten. You'll need some extensive forensics to get it back, if any, even partially.

I am not familiar with a reputable how-to dualboot guide that would have advised you to do precisely what you did. Unfortunately, this looks like a case where Linux gave you the tools, and the freedom, to do damage that you did not intend. Not because Linux did anything malicious, or the code was poorly written, or the tool was poorly implemented. But because the tool, particularly gparted, is much much more powerful than anything Windows offers.

But, seriously, no harm? You can restore that data from a backup, right?

It is POSSIBLE that no data is lost. Don't get your hopes up, but it is pretty well guaranteed that if you resize a NTFS partition that is bootable for Windows you WILL NEED (guaranteed!) to run Windows chkdsk a couple times to "fix" the partition so that Windows can use it again. It is pretty certain that this is part of your problem. It is possible that this is ALL of your problem.

This may be as simple as booting your Windows recovery CD. You do have a Microsoft CD with that licensed install of Windows, right?

[RedWagon]

You might be able to mound the Windows partition in Mint and copy it over. Something I've found that works if cp doesn't work is

Code: Select all

cat source > destination

Post the output from

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sudo fdisk -l

and we can help you mount it.

[Mint gum]

don't know if this thread is still active but i have the recovery cd's that i could only burn once. my windows xp was already installed on my pc when i purchased it.

also the recovery cd's are older than the data i that i really want to save not sure if it matters
sorry for the delay i have been busy and avoiding this

[dnmint]

Just for my info, which machine ? Is it a Toshiba Netbook?

[kansasnoob]

Install two things in Mint:

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sudo apt-get install gparted ntfsprogs

Then restart for ntfsprogs to work.

Go to Partition Editor, it should be in one section of Control Center or System > Administration.

With ntfsprogs installed gparted should be able to see how much of the Windows partition is used and how much is free. We should know that.

Also ntfsprogs has full read and write capabilities in NTFS partitions so now just double click Computer and you should be able to figure out by size which partition is Windows. Just double click it and if you're in Windows you should almost know it. You'll see a Documents and Settings folder so double click on that and you should see folders for each user.

From there you should be able to see what files still exist and you can just right click on any of them, select copy, and then paste them into one of your Mint Home folders. Larger files like movies take a while to copy-n-paste. But you can transfer any file from Windows to Mint that way.

[Mint gum]

i already have the ntfsprogs installed and it shows fat32 (i think it's the windows partition) has 8.57gigs with 7.98 used. if i right click to check it there is an option to repair should I?

this doesn't look good that is not enough space I think I'm screwed!