Hi,

Defragmenting is not mentioned here, and it is pretty important. Many of these tools won't work without defragmenting your Windows thoroughly.

I used ntfsresize and cfdisk to resize XP Pro on my 450MHzP3 with 6G HD, and create new partitions for Linux.

I didn't use qtparted because, I thought it was poor, although nice to look at.
Fdisk gave me wild info about my HD, saying that it already had four partitions (hda1p1, hda1p2, hda1p3 and hda1p4). Cfdisk appeared the most serious of the tools.

I followed all the available instructions and everything was went fairly smoothly, except when I tried to boot back in XPPro under the newly partitioned HD. The splash screen holds for about a second and then I get a blue screen of death with error type "unmountable_boot_volume". After that, I feared the worst. But I was able to see my original NTFS volume with Knoppix OK and even read some of the files.

I have W98 bootable diskette, and I managed to perform a "fdisk /mbr" as indicated above. I followed it with a SYS C: (again, as advised above) but DOS refused to recognise it. Could be a simple FAT-NTFS problem, I thought ... so I tried to log into XP again (under the various options allowed) and the same error always "unmountable_boot_volume".

In many ways, I wasn't surprised. Windows is a many headed monster which doesn't even know itself, so any changes, no matter how meticulously undertaken are sure to mess it up (after all, it is a mess already).

Can anybody offer any light on this situation? How can I get XP to mount its partition (c: drive) again? The overall head title for this thread really promises more than it gives: it's ungoofing advice seems really rushed. There have got to be more experience and more suggestions ... I can't be the only one for whom it didn't work first time ...