RE: Resizing FAT32 produces unexpected results

[Sean Hogan]

Teppo said:
> Hello,
>
> I have a IBM Thinkpad A20p with Windows 2000 installed. The laptop
> uses a 17G IBM hard disk. There was one large FAT32 partition.
>
<blah blah blah>
>
> Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
> corrupt:
> windows 2000 root\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
> Please re-install a copy of the above file.
>
<etc etc etc>

I had a similar problem.  And I don't have the solution (altho I did get
W2000 running again... see below).  I would be interested in finding out
why.

Whenever I acquire a HDD, the first thing I do is put a small DOS partition
at the start, and install PowerQuest's PartitionMagic and BootMagic in that
partition.  I would like to do this with Parted & Linux/FreeBSD instead...
so that I could mount and read every partition no matter what format.
Haven't got around to it...

So... I have this system with DOS/Win2000(Fat32)/Data(Fat32) partitions.  I
copy the data to a 2nd HDD, then kill that partition to install FreeBSD.
All this was done with PartitionMagic... sorry...

When I got around to rebooting Windows 2000, voila:
Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt:
<windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Well, I verified that this file is still there/ hasn't been changed.  So I
tried several things...
Including trying to rescue the installation with the Win2000 CD... which
could NOT detect a Win2000 installation... except that it did detect when I
selected console mode (which didn't help much).  If I had an Emergency
Repair Disk (stoopid me) then maybe it would have been different... maybe
not.
Anyway, I figured on reinstalling Win2000 to the same partition (different
directory) and then doing some diffing, etc.  Well... the installation did
detect the present W2000 system and offered to repair it... which I
accepted... which took a long time and seemed to do a complete
reinstallation.... except that when it finally rebooted I still had all my
apps and profiles more or less intact (haven't tried them all yet).

Now... my suspicion is that for some reason the boot.ini file is no longer
valid (I have no basis for this... completely arbitrary).  I messed around
with it but nothing helped.  However, now that everything is reinstalled my
boot.ini file is changed (here is it's present contents)

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2000
Professional" /fastdetect

Does anyone know what multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3) means??
I tried a few different combinations in my trials and travails... maybe this
one, maybe not.

cheers,
SDH

PS  I have just added the line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2000
Professional" /fastdetect

to my boot.ini file and when I reboot select this second option it comes up
with exactly the afore-mentioned error.  I'm also wondering whether I did my
mucking around while W2000 was hibernated (as opposed to shutdown).  This
would be so not good.

blah blah blah