Windows XP won't boot after merging partitions

Ok here's the problem. I recently merged two partitions on a harddrive using Acronis Disk Director Suite. On this hard drive I had two partitions 1) Didn't have anything stored on it (~3Gig) and the other (~55Gig) had the rest of my files stored on it. I wanted to merge them into one partition and then create seperate partitions for windows files and my other files.

All went well until i rebooted the computer. Everytime it boots it comes up with the message "windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware."

This is as far as it will go and won't start up in safe mode etc.

Obviously this is a result of merging partitions. Could someone please help me resolve this issue?

Thanks

 

Have fixed the problem. Used the bootcfg options on the windows setup disks. All working fine now

 

Hello swannies1983,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

Most likely you have changed the drive letter of Windows boot partition during the merge procedure. Could you please describe your actions step-by-step? What was the original hard drive's layout (what partitions, drive letters were there before merging)?

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please create an account, then log in and submit a request for technical support. Attach the collected report file to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

I originally had two partitions:

1) ~3Gig with nothing on it. The drive letter was D:
2) ~55Gig with everything else on it. The drive letter was C:


I used the merge option to merge the two partitions. Following boot up it displayed the quote I gave you in the previous email. I then created some XP start up/boot disks and used the bootcfg option to create a new boot.ini file. The next time I booted up it gave me two operating system options

1) New one
2) Existing one

If I tried booting from the exiting one, it wouldn't load. It did boot using the new boot.ini file.

Once windows loaded, i ran the msconfig command and looked at the boot.ini data. The existing file showed the boot info was in partition two (of the existing format). As I created a single partition, this process was invalid. I then just deleted the old boot.ini file.

All is well

Thanks