Using GParted on a Vista 64 bit dual boot with CentOS 5 Linux … what not to do tutorial.

So I got a new machine for work pretty sweet, built it with 8 GB to start with Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz with GIGABYTE Intel P45 Motherboard,  1TB SATA HD, 2x Graphics Cards each with Dual DVI out, HDTV/S-Video and a wicked cool gaming tower.

Anyway, put it together loaded Vista Ultimate 64 bit, loaded CentOS 5 setup my dev environment and everything was just peachy.

Only issue was my decision to setup a small primary partition for Vista. I setup my system volume with 35GB on it, setup a larger one for primary files and planned on loading most of my data off the system volume.

Make a long story short, ran out of space on the drive. I was pretty impressed with the Disc Management in Vista being able to setup a partition very quickly. Quickly realized you cannot extend your primary drive however. Hmm… I was stuck. My co-worker had a great idea, booted up Linux, grabbed GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) and was able to easily move around my partions. Seemed all too easy. Well, decided for some reason to shrink my 425GB partition down to 325GB and was planning on allocating the 100GB extra to my primary.

Clicked on the button to begin and was unpleasantly surprised it took over 93 hours in total to complete the operations.
So, once done everything seemed fine, I hadn’t resized my primary partition yet, I wanted to boot up in Vista and see if everything still worked. It didn’t, I couldn’t boot. I would get to the Windows load screen, see the very first Vista Green background and nothing would happen. I was working on another machine so I left it up for 2 hours but could see no disc activity. Uh oh!

Googled for a bit tried all kinds of stuff but to no avail. It was a pain to setup the environment but not too bad so I figured it might be easier just to reload Vista. Put in my install disc, but couldn’t get past the green screen, now I was really screwed.

Many posts said to boot off the DVD and click on Repair in the Vista installation screen, but I couldn’t get to that screen. This post on this forum was the key http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2472228#post2472228.
I grabbed an XP disc, booted from disc, choose the repair option and entered in a bad password 3 times like the post said, took out my disc when it rebooted, and holy mackerel it worked!

I guess I should have used the shrink volume in Vista to free up the space, it would have been much faster but live and learn I guess.