Screwed up winload.efi after editing partitions

[theorange]

Hey guys, so I done screwed something up here.

So I had decided to give EaseUS partition manager a try instead of just using gparted, to reorganize a 2TB disk from looking like this:

| Windows EFI partition | 1.5TB Windows partition | 1MB unallocated | 450MB Recovery | 500GB unallocated |

and eventually merging the 500GB unallocated space with the primary partition. So, I was gonna move the recovery to the right end, and just merge the unallocated space from there. I didn't think moving the recovery was any big deal, so I didn't make a backup or anything, as I've never even backed up to the recovery, I figured it'd be empty. So, I decided to move the recovery and merge the empty space in two steps, to be safe. As I was applying the recovery partition move, though, my system crashed and won't reboot, which is strange, as I wasn't editing the primary partition at all.

Now, however, I get error 0xc00000225, missing winload.efi, which I tried to fix by running bootrec from a repair usb, but with no luck. I decided to check diskpart, and my 2TB disk doesn't even show, which shows me that I probably screwed up on more than one level...

 

[i7Baby]

Maybe now's a good time to buy that SSD you always wanted to run your OS on.

It'll let you use Disk Management to see what you can do with the Hard Drive.

 

[theorange]

Heyo! I actually do have a 64GB SSD running as a cache drive on that 2TB HDD. Looking back on it, I think that may have caused the system crash. I probably should have unaccelerated the RAID setup before messing with it.

I'm running gparted from parted magic, it looks like gparted sees the partitions but I'm getting that "Partition does not exist" warning message.

 

[i7Baby]

Try Disk Management instead.

 

[theorange]

It's a 3.5" HDD, and unfortunately for me, I don't have a 3.5" enclosure, so I'm gonna have to go with a live bootable solution.

 

[i7Baby]

Disk Management is the Windows equivalent of gparted.

 

[theorange]

Yeah, unfortunately, windows won't even boot, and I won't be able to connect the HDD to another system, which is what I would need the enclosure for.

 

[i7Baby]

Buy a SSD you can run your OS on.

 

[theorange]

Hey, what do you know! I don't even know what I did, but I somehow got diskpart to see my 2TB disk now!

And yeah like I said, I already have a 64GB SSD in my system, so I'm not really sure if its worth it to get another one just to fix this problem...

 

[i7Baby]

Not even - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-internal-hard-drive-ct128mx100ssd1 ?

 

[theorange]

Haha, I have a portable HD I decided to install Win8 onto, instead of trying to salvage the partition table, I'm just gonna make an image of windows then reinstall.

Ordering those Crucial drives on amazon always get you sent larger sizes though, so may not be such a bad idea haha! Why are you so adamant about buying one?

 

[i7Baby]

64gb is too small for an OS drive these days.

 

[USAFRet]

64gb is too small for an OS drive these days.

Indeed.
I recently rebuilt my daughters laptop. Win 7 64 Home Premium.
After the OS and updates, a small selection of utilities (~1GB), and MS Office(~3GB)...it was ~40GB used space.

Given that you have to leave 10-15% free space on an SSD, that would leave usable space of about 55GB.
So that would be ~3 movies of space left on a 64GB SSD.

 

[theorange]

Maybe so, but I'm actually quite satisfied with the performance of my 64GB, I used intel SRT to set it up as a RAID 0 cache, and it seems to have enough space for my windows installation and all my most used apps and programs--literally all of them. It gets me from pressing the power button to all startup programs loaded and windows usable in <16 seconds. (Win 8.1) And yeah, SSD prices really have fallen a lot since I did my last build, July of 2014, and I can get a 128GB for the same price as I got the 64GB last year, and I would've gotten a 128 in the beginning, but unfortunately, SRT only allows up to 64GB, and I'm too lazy to organize my own startup drive.

As for the original problem though, I've given up hope of trying to salvage the partition table, I'm just gonna reinstall now, fortunately booting up windows from my external HD allows me to access the local drive just fine.

 

[USAFRet]

Maybe so, but I'm actually quite satisfied with the performance of my 64GB, I used intel SRT to set it up as a RAID 0 cache, and it seems to have enough space for my windows installation and all my most used apps and programs--literally all of them. It gets me from pressing the power button to all startup programs loaded and windows usable in <16 seconds. (Win 8.1) And yeah, SSD prices really have fallen a lot since I did my last build, July of 2014, and I can get a 128GB for the same price as I got the 64GB last year, and I would've gotten a 128 in the beginning, but unfortunately, SRT only allows up to 64GB, and I'm too lazy to organize my own startup drive.

As for the original problem though, I've given up hope of trying to salvage the partition table, I'm just gonna reinstall now, fortunately booting up windows from my external HD allows me to access the local drive just fine.

Using it as a cache drive is completely different than using it for a drive on its own.

 

[theorange]

Yeah, I realize. I'll probably be keeping it as a cache drive for the 2TB and then installing another SSD for a startup sometime sooner or later.

 

[i7Baby]

Good idea.

 

[theorange]

Welp, I guess we've successfully steered this conversation from corrupted partition tables to startup ssds. I must ask though, why so adamant about it? It's the eventual way of the future anyways.

 

[USAFRet]

Welp, I guess we've successfully steered this conversation from corrupted partition tables to startup ssds. I must ask though, why so adamant about it? It's the eventual way of the future anyways.

Corrupted partition tables. Wipe and reinstall.

It is already screwed up in multiple ways. Could it be fixed? Possibly.
Will that take far longer than just a reinstall? Probably.

 

[theorange]

Yeah, that's what I'm doing now, like I mentioned earlier. Backing up now! Thanks for the help though.