[ale] Fought Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.10 (resolved)

[Michael Trausch]

Why?

I suspect that you are confusing some issues. Windows is picky about its FS, yes, but it's boot logic is also very sensitive to coordination between partitions and filesystems. If you resize a boot volume you must ensure that either the boot machinery is intact or rebuilt in order to accommodate the possible new locations of various core metadata.

Mostly this means that the boot registry (vista and later only) matches the on disk layout. 

Ironically it was slightly easier dealing with NTLDR, which was the mechanism used in XP and earlier. It used a config file with entries relative to itself, meaning that once you got the host computer to boot the partition from its boot sector you were good until the switch to protected mode (at which point you quickly become screwed if you've no native NT driver for the boot drive, which is what commonly manifests as INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE or similar wording.

I have been working at way too low a level for too long on Microsoft infrastructures...

Oh, and since EFI is essentially a Windows style pre-boot environment, you'd think that it'd have gotten *easier* to portably boot the thing. Well, maybe it has. Haven't actually witnessed the Windows to Go thing firsthand. Really want to know why all the fanfare, when we've been doing this for YEARS. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 10, 2015, at 9:30 AM, DJ-Pfulio <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:
> 
> As great as gparted is, don't use it for NTFS partitions loaded with the Windows
> OS. Use Windows tools for that.