Please keep the Debian bug report CCed; therefore quoting your full mail.

Sorry for not replying earlier, but I've been too busy with the RC1 
release of Debian Installer (and had to replace the hard disk in my 
laptop in the mean time too).

On Thursday 12 October 2006 21:13, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> So far nobody else reported similar problem with Vista beta what you
> had, so below are some questions and suggestions.

OK, but has anybody actively tried to reproduce the issue? Or rather, have 
you had any positive reports that a resize operation for Windows Vista, 
roughly similar to what I have done, succeeded?
The absence of other reports does _not_ mean that there is no problem! I 
very much doubt all that many people are trying this yet.

> On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, Frans Pop wrote:
> > Looks like I made a mistake somehow while _creating_ the md5sum file.
> > It turns out the files are actually unchanged. I'm not sure what I've
> > done wrong, but the following leads me to conclude this was a false
> > lead: - after restoring the vmware image _before resize_, the files
> > that were
>
> Can you reproduce the bootability problem with the latest Vista Beta on
> 32-bit x86 (that's what most people use currently) if you shrink NTFS
> by 4 KB on a real hardware, real Vista installation (no vmware and
> other emulators involved at all)?

I already had reproduced it on 32-bit x86 as I used vmware. But I have now 
also reproduced it on real hardware.

While re-installing my laptop I _have_ tried again with the version I do 
have _after_ updating that using the MS update service to the current 
version. I got *exactly the same problems* when resizing to 10GB, so that 
now means I have reproduced the issue independently on three different 
platforms:
- my Pentium 4 laptop
- my EM64T desktop
- vmware

The resize test on my laptop was again without resizing the partition 
itself, but only the file system using ntfs-resize.

A resize of Windows XP (using Debian Installer) on my laptop went fine.

But no sorry, I cannot test with a current version of Vista. I bought the 
Beta2 version of Vista only to test the installer's support of it and am 
not all that interested in trying to get another version.

> Did you contact Microsoft with the bug report as I suggested? What did
> they answer? Perhaps they already fixed the Vista bootability bug in
> the newer betas?

No, I have no interest in persuing this with Microsoft. I'll gladly leave 
that to people more interested in actually using their products.

> Please note, if ntfsresize fails with Vista beta then it's highly
> possible that Partition Magic, Paragon, Acronis, BootitNG and all other
> NTFS resizers fail too. Microsoft did this mistake in the past which
> they had to correct later on and if they don't have the old devel team
> (which is very possible) then it's quite probably they will make the
> same mistake again unless somebody tells them before their final
> product release (that's why they release the buggy betas). So, even if
> you didn't notify Microsoft, others might did already, hence it would
> be worth retesting the problem with the latest Vista version. Could you
> do it please?

As I've said above, I personally have absolutely no interest in tracking 
this down further. I have done what I can, provided all information that 
I can be expected to provide with the software I have available. I think 
I have spent more time and effort on this than most people.
IMO it now really is up to the ntfs-resize community to track this issue 
down: send out calls to test this on your mailing lists, see if others 
can reproduce the problem or not. I'm a bit disappointed that that has 
not already happened since my last mail...
There must be others who _do_ have newer versions of Vista, and maybe even 
some who have both "my" version and newer ones and can compare them both.

What I did is well documented in the Debian bug report [1] and should be 
repeatable. Debian CD images are of course freely available :-)

I do very much appreciate your comments and suggestions which very much 
have helped narrow things down, but this is as far as I can go.

Please keep us informed if you do make progress on this issue. Even though 
I do not use Microsoft software myself anymore, I'd very much like to see 
Debian being able to support dual boot installations for systems running 
Vista.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/379628

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