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Resized partition and now Windows wont boot

I have Mountain Lion on a late 2011 Macbook Pro with Windows 7 installed through boot camp. Everything was running fine then I ran out of space and to get some more GB's I shrunk OSX in disk utility then went into Windows and downloaded a program (AOMEI Partition Assistant) to move the windows partition on the other side of the free space so it could be exteneded into the windows partition. Once everything was done and needed a restart I got met with the following error: 0xc0000225 "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible".


So far I've tried using winclone to take a clone of the partition and using bootcamp to swallow the partition then restoring the image with winclone again. that didnt work.


Then i used the whole bootrec suite (/fixmbr, /rebuildbcd, etc etc)


Marked partition as active. Everything reports back with success


Still nothing.


Then i installed rEFit and it said everything was synced up.


Still nothing.


I did boot into recovery hd and with terminal used diskutil list and found that theres 14 disks. disk0 is my ssd with osx and windows, disk1 is the windows dvd, disk2-13 are all 1mb or less....I was reading somewhere that OSX can only read 4 disks?


Any help would be awesome, I am almost coming to terms with having to wipe everything and restart but I would rather not lose the programs and setup i currently have. Tell me what i need to enter into terminal to report back im pretty well versed in computers just not coding so you can have me do just about anything.


Thank you so much!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 2.2Ghz Core i7 8GB RAM. 120GB SSD.

Posted on Feb 10, 2013 9:51 PM

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33 replies

Feb 11, 2013 12:18 PM in response to oly va ha

You can never use Windows only resize tools on a Boot Camp disk. It damages them. You can only use tools that explicitly support Boot Camp, because the tool must simultaneously manage JHFS+, NTFS files systems for resizing; and also the two partition schemes used, MBR and GPT. It's a totally non-standard arrangement and I know of only a few utilities that can do this. Apple Disk Utility is not one of them, it will damage things also.


A conventional Windows partition/resize utility will only change the MBR, and it will damage or corrupt the GPT. This results in a level of damage that really can't be fixed easily, and maybe can't be fixed at all. The best, simplest, fastest option for you is to start from scratch: repartition the drive with Disk Utility, changing the partition scheme from Current to 1 Partition; restore OS X from backup, use Boot Camp Assistant to resize the disk, resinstall/restore Windows.

Feb 11, 2013 12:28 PM in response to Christopher Murphy

is there any way to backup the windows install so i can redo the partition scheme and then just restore the windows image so my data/programs are still intact?


when i did it with winclone it looks like winclone backed up the partition mapping as well, so it didnt fix the problem at all...unless i did something wrong.


what i did:

I backed up the windows image with winclone.

then used boot camp to remove the windows 7 partition

then used boot camp to reinstall the windows partition once it made the boot camp partition i used winclone to restore the windows image.

then i restarted the computer and experienced the same error 0xc000025.

Feb 11, 2013 12:43 PM in response to Csound1

As far as I know, in a single GUI application there are only three that explicitly support resizing Boot Camped disks: Camp Tune, iPartition, Winclone. But I haven't used any of them, and don't know to what degree they can repair problems like this. The issue is that, upon changing the MBR separate from the GPT, it's totally ambiguous to these tools which is correct. And if it makes the wrong assumption, the problem will get worse. If it has some logic that it can use to work out the problem, including scanning for other structures, then it might be possible to sort out the mess. But I don't know any tool that does this automatically.


Again, your best bet is to start from scratch. If you have no backups, you can check out Test Disk and see if it can find/recover anything. But it's a very dense set of tools, it's not an automatic, push button sort of thing either. And it is possible to make the problem worse.


So if this is critical data, you need to cut your losses and send it off for professional data recovery. But if that were the case, I'd think you have backups.

Feb 11, 2013 1:00 PM in response to oly va ha

Well, I wouldn't say you used it incorrectly so much as you used it at all. Disk Utility should not let users modify Boot Camp'd disks at all, short of obliterating all data on them (with a very clear warning that it's about to do so).


The Boot Camp guide vaguely says you should use Boot Camp Assistant to make changes to the disk; I don't think it flat out says using Disk Utility is proscribed. I know the guide doesn't explicitly proscribe using Windows only resize utilities, but I think it should have a warning; not that most people read that guide anyway... but those who do may be saved from misery.


As for your other questions, I can't answer them, I'd only be guessing. Three utilities have made changes to different aspects of the partition schemes being used. So it's ambiguous which one is correct. As soon as a utility changes the state, the previous state is lost, and that's the downward spiral that usually leads to irreparable data loss.

Feb 11, 2013 1:08 PM in response to Christopher Murphy

yes i can boot OSX perfectly fine, windows all i get is the 0xc0000225 error


sudo gpt -r show -vv disk0

gpt: illegal option -- v

usage: gpt show [-l] device ...


sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 14751/255/63 [236978176 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>

2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 156250000] HFS+

3: AB 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 156659640 - 1269536] Darwin Boot

*4: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 157929472 - 79046656] HPFS/QNX/AUX




i never used DU to modify the bootcamp partition, i used a windows application to extend the free space that i got from shrinking the OSX partition with DU. that software moved the windows partition to the left, putting the free space on the right of the windows partition and then extended the windows partition

Feb 11, 2013 1:14 PM in response to Christopher Murphy

Christopher Murphy wrote:


As far as I know, in a single GUI application there are only three that explicitly support resizing Boot Camped disks: Camp Tune, iPartition, Winclone.

I have used all 3, iPartition does not leave you with a bootable partition very often, I have not used the current version of Winclone but previous versions were a disaster (I am told that the latest version is 'better') and Camp Tune works (for me) everytime, but unlike the other 2 it is a One Trick Pony (and sometimes that is a good thing)

Resized partition and now Windows wont boot

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