Windows 10: Tried to move the Windows partition - broke the boot

I have a laptop here which was upgraded from Win7 to Win10. The MBR partition structure was a 100MB Dell utilities partition, a 14GB recovery partition, and then Windows.

I wanted to delete the recovery partition, slide the Windows partition to the left, shrink it, and create a 50GB partition at the end of the drive for system backups.

Windows' native disk utility would not delete the recovery partition, so I used an old version (6) of minitool partition wizard to do it. It was supposed to reboot to a live environment to perform the critical functions. Instead, it rebooted to a blinking cursor on a black screen.

All attempts to rescue the boot were futile. I did the bootrec routine, but /fixboot errored out with "no element found", I believe it was. Making the Windows partition Active didn't help. Of course, automatic startup repair was useless. When I tried to create a \efi\microsoft\boot\ hierarchy in the windows partition, the subsequent /fixboot drew the noisome "access denied" error.

NeoSmart has an Easy Recovery disk for sale, but I doubt it would help. Besides, I wish to understand what went wrong and how to correct it. Maybe the partition wizard version was too old and can't handle Win10? But in any case, should it not be possible to correct the boot of a really messed up drive, as can be done with Win7 without too much difficulty?

I'm reinstalling Win10 on that machine, so this question is academic. But for future use, does anyone know how to correct a scenario like this?

Thank you.

:)

 

How to go about building a tri-boot system?

i dual boot all the time, and going in to tri boot is easy.

step 1) partition the drive in to 3 partitions ( leaving 1 empty for the linux installer. )
step 2) install windows on the first 2 partitions.
step 3) install linux, and let it auto partition the remaining space. ( i recommend at least 30gb of space for linux, because it will make things a lot easier. )

step 4) enjoy.

 

How to go about building a tri-boot system?

Yeah, but he's throwing OS X in there. Not quite as easy to do, but not all that hard. Manual configuration of GRUB is necessary.

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that