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Partitioning gone wrong
I have a multi boot system with 5 windows installs and linux and had a drive being used as a system drive with the boot information but was rarely used for booting an OS. Therefore I wanted to remove it as the system (boot) drive. I used EasyBCD to change the booting, although forgot about the Win 7 boot files.
I have had some problems over the previous few days with windows BSOD and there seems to of been a problem with the primary hard drive data cable, which I changed and now it appears to be better, however there is a chance that it could be a hard drive problem.
I rebooted and did some re-partioning on one drive, making some room on several partitions which was being used up by free space which I was reserving for another operating system, although a bit too big. I therefore expanded two primary partitions and shrank the free space to 60GB, expanding the two operating systems primary partitions, one an old XP Pro and the other Win 7 x64. The XP install was an install from a previous PC build and does not work on my current PC and I intended to install Win 7 x64 onto it.
Unfortunately, things went wrong! During the partition resize, the re-partitioning software came up with an IO error with a cross linked files being reported. The partitioning continued somewhat and seemed to complete okay. Following a reboot, my system wouldn't boot as I expected. However after repairing the booting and things were not right.
The partitioning was not correct, the partition sizes were as they were before partitioning with their original sizes. Many of the programs were not running properly or working.
I wonder whether the XP and Win 7 x64 installs files somehow got mixed up while things were being moved and stopped mid way.
After the cross linked files I wanted to do a check disk to try and resolve things. However chkdsk would not run. sfc would not run either.
chkdsk.exe cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows.
sfc /scannow
Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation.
Some other programs give similar errors about compatibility.
For some reason there are no restore points.
I have managed to get windows to do a chkdsk at reboot by replacing chkdsk from the install DVD but it found nothing wrong.
I would like suggestions on how best to restore windows to a working state. I have lots of programs and customizations that I don't really want to have to redo from scratch.