I’m running a combination XP and OS X machines at home linked together using Synergy. I’ve been contemplating moving away from XP so thought I’ll give Ubuntu another go.
My drives are pretty full except my OS Boot drive, lots of space there so I thought I’ll resize it and put Ubuntu at the end in a small partition while I test things out. It sounded like a good idea at the time but it turned out to be pretty disastrous.
I used the GParted LiveCD to do the resizing after first running a defrag on the drive. On the surface everything went fine but the XP wouldn’t boot.
I admit not reading up enough about the process but it turns out after doing the resize with GParted you’ll need to force chkdsk the boot disk, the only way to do this involves using the XP Setup CD and it’s recovery console.
My machine has a SATA drive that isn’t directly supported by the XP Setup disk so I need to use a Floppy driver disk, I don’t even have a floppy drive anymore so I was pretty much stuck.
I installed Ubuntu 6.10 in the free space, it worked a charm and I soon had at least something back up to get going but still needed to chkdsk the XP partition. I knew the files were there – Ubuntu mounted it on the Desktop – so it was all good, except something small somewhere causing grief.
I was faced with either buying a Floppy drive and Floppy cables, and finding blank floppies somewhere or finding another solution. Solution came in the form of VMWare Server.
VMWare supports mounting RAW partitions into a VM, so in theory I should be able to create a virtual instance that boots my XP Partition, I tried this and ended up with a Blue Screen and immediate reboot. The problem being that my SATA drive shows up as a SCSI drive in XP under VMWare and my XP did not have the right drivers to load the drive and boot from it, so still I needed to chkdsk the drive.
I took my XP CD, downloaded the VMWare Server drivers and mounted that as a floppy into the VM, booted from the CD and loaded the drivers into the CD, ran the recovery console and got a C:\ prompt. Here I was able to chkdsk the stricken partition and eventually boot right into XP, problem solved.
I took this one step further by creating a new hardware profile in my XP box once it was running, loaded in the VMWare SCSI drivers and now I can boot my XP into fully working state under Ubuntu using VMWare.
So, the short of it, yes you can resize your XP Pro Boot disks, even NTFS ones using Open Source tools, but you need to be 100% sure you can get your recovery console up and running to run chkdsk afterwards, my machine is now happy again and booting Ubuntu and XP.
VMware Kicks Arse.
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