Partitioning NiteMare!

[tjcinnamon]

I am backing up all (3) of our finance departments computers. All of the important data is on the server (Thank GOD). I am backing them up because their set up is a more complex than most of the office machines.

I used Acronis Disk Manager to shrink the partitions down to smaller 20GB sizes (the PC's have 140GB but only 12GB used). I figured I could shrink them down to 20GB and then back all three of the PC's on to one 74GB drive and do it twice.

The first machine went fine. I shrunk the partition and backed it up. The second machine at some point during the partition shrinking the program errored out. I'm not sure where.

The 2nd machine booted at first, I got a lot of weird errors on windows starting up about certain files being damaged. I immediatly tried to run a ScanDisk and when I restarted, to run the scandisk, it said that windows cannot start due to PCI.sys is damaged or missing. It says I should try to try to do a repair windows install. I tried to put in the XP install disk it freezes on the disk and says that it's missing a file. I am going to try another XP install disk but I'm not sure if that will fix the problem.

Would a scan disk help this computer start up, after all it did but once?

What is going on with it? What software would fix this?

How can I salvage this computer or at least repair it enough to be able to re-setup the machine by Monday so no one can blindly blame me for something.

Thanks, JOe K.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Your partition table blew out

There is no real quick fix. How ever you do seem to have acronis so you might be able to recover it.

Do you have the full acronis suite? Bootable CD and all that?

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products...ry-manager.html <-- This is what I am thinking. It MIGHT recover the partition table.

Edited August 23, 2008 by Kelsenellenelvian

[tjcinnamon]

I have the 15 day demo. I've only used it for a day. So yes I think I have that.

Also, would it make sense that the partition table blew out because I was able to log into the machine (with random errors popping up will things loaded) but then when I restarted to run a scan disk is when the OS was no longer able to boot. Would the partition blowing out have everything just start to unravel? Or would I have never been able to boot at all?

Thanks,

JOe K.

[submix8c]

Uhhh, did you Defrag first? Files hang around "at the end of the Partition" and may "disappear" and/or get "corrupted" during a Resize operation.

Try "restoring" the partitions to the resized ones. I use Symantec Ghost ("compressed", meaing not every single sector, only the MFT and Files/Folders) for backing up, resize the original, then Restore to the resized. No loss whatsoever, as long as sufficient room is given on the resized for "growth"... Never, never, never resize to the exact size of the "used space"!

20GB should have been fine, but if I understand you correctly, you "shrunk" before "backup". Big mistake, so the above advice may be useless.

You might try "resizing" it back to the original size and pray loudly to whatever gods you worship.

Rule of thumb - always backup first before mucking about... Hope you have an uderstanding/tolerant supervisor/manager.

edit - K hit the nail... check to see what Acronis can do for you...

Edited August 23, 2008 by submix8c

[tjcinnamon]

Thanks for the advice. It was a foolish move to try and shrink prior to back up without a defrag. I thought when they resized a partition the program would defrag and move the files first. Lesson learned.

I'll keep you updated. Thanks for the help,

JOe K.