Help me save the boot record on this VM!

November 21, 2008 1:22 PM

FixMBR, Fixboot, FixAnything and I can't get this Parallels partition to boot up. Urgent advice needed from fellow Mefites!

I have a boot camp partition that was brought into Parallels for a client. Everything was working fine. He also wanted 30GB of free space on the drive as a separate partition to install another version of OSX. After handling that (using GParted to do the live partioning) it appears it has messed up the bootloader for the Boot Camp partition.

Things I've tried:

*Boot from XP disk, go to recovery console, FixBoot and FixMBR commands
*Attempt a "Repair Restore" which does not show up after accepting the license agreement on the XP disk
*Edited the Parallels PVS file to recognize the boot camp drive on disk0s3
*Boot from GParted, UBCD, any other live disks for any tool that can make this bootable again.

All the files are there, the thing just hangs when attempting to boot from the hard drive. Is there any free tool I can use quickly that will repair this? The client will be back in less than an hour and I've been racking my brain and finally turn to AskMe. Help?

posted by genial to Technology (1 answer total)

Windows is notoriously finicky when moving a partition, due to rather stupid design of the NTFS boot sector, which contains the absolute offset of the partition start from the start of the disk. I recently wasted a couple of hours on this, detailed in this blog post.

ntfsreloc should be able to help you.
posted by themel at 1:33 PM on November 21, 2008