ntfsresize doesn't back up the boot sector

[Noam Yorav-Raphael]

Binary package hint: ntfsprogs

Hello,

I just resized an NTFS partition using gparted, and then by mistake overwritten its boot sector with something else.
NTFS partitions should end with a copy of the boot sector (first 512 bytes). However, I didn't find the backup there.
It caused me quite a lot of trouble. At the end I used the original backup, which was found where the original file system ended.

To summarize: ntfsresize should copy the boot sector to the end of the file system after it resizes it.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.10, the version of ntfsprogs is 2.0.0-1ubuntu2.

Thanks,
Noam

[Kingdon Barrett (kingdon)]

Yeah, I had the same issue with the ntfsresize that is currently in elive (debian lenny) ntfsprogs-2.0.0-1 -- I was not sure of the original disk geometry, and /fixboot was not helping, so my solution was to resize the partition again, and put it at the start of the disk.

It worked! I would speculate that the partition start was not on a cylinder boundary. No combination of chkdsk and ntfsresize --force --info would cause the fixboot task to succeed, until I tried this.

Unfortunately this is not enough. It's my friend's computer, and she really wanted to keep that recovery partition. Does anyone know more about this problem than we've exposed in this thread? It only vaguely resembles the issue from the FAQ, posted in 2004 about libparted-1.6. I was actually afraid this might happen, so I refrained from moving the starting boundary of the partition at first.

Can you tell about what you did to copy the boot sector (dd? what parameters) and where you put it so as to be sure that a) chainloader +1 will find it, and b) you're not writing somewhere that you shouldn't?

[Noam Yorav-Raphael (noamraph)]

It was quite a long time ago, but I think that I just opened the file
with Python - something like:

sudo python
f = open('/dev/something', 'rw+')
f.seek(somewhere)
s = f.read(512)
f.seek(0)
f.write(s)
f.close()

I'm writing this to illustrate what I think I did - so please check
before you do something.

[Jean-Pierre (jean-pierre-andre)]

On this issue, see http://tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=30157&sid=3cbd3aa600181004df63ad98506701ef

[Flames_in_Paradise (ellisistfroh-deactivatedaccount)]

This should get fixed with "2014.2.15 (January 23, 2014), 2014.2.15AR.1"

see also bug #1295030 ([SRU] backport request)

Closing this bug for now by setting status="incomplete", because both versions mentioned here ntfs-3g/Ubuntu 8.10 are not longer supported.

If you cannot agree please feel free to reopen this bug.

Thanks for reporting and regards

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ntfs-3g (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]