This is one common problem that I see pretty often lately. It was a while ago when my girlfriend brought me her new notebook with Windows Vista installed, and she wanted to resize the partitions, because her primary c: partition was 10GB by default (some genius installed it that way). Although Vista has unfriendly interface for PC Technicians, it does have some basic but pretty useful tools built in which XP lacked, like searching online for drivers, working imaging tool, fast and useful OS repair. So I figured it must have the option built in for resizing partitions, and guess what, I was right! Right click on “My Computer” -> “Manage” and then Disk Management. All of the installed drives can be seen there. With right click on the partition I wanted to resize and I saw the new option Shrink/Extend your partition. Great, but this was somewhat confusing, I wanted to extend it, when I realized the whole hard drive was a mess, there were five different partitions on a 160GB hard drive, of which only three were formatted. So Vista’s tool wasn’t helpful here, I tried to shrink and extend a few times, but I only made it worse, and since they contained some important data, I decided to go with my standard procedure. I insert my hiren’s boot cd 9.5 and boot from it. I selected Acronis Disk Director 10 -> Manual mode. The image of the disk looked like shish kebab. It was so hard to determine what was what. I worked it out after some time, and when I was finally happy with the result I saw, I restarted my computer and boom! There it was:

winload.exe vista The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

File: \windows\system32\winload.exe

Status: 0xc000000f

Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

It was late at night and the notebook should have been ready until the next morning. After I woke up my neighbors with a loud lion roar I calmed myself a bit and started searching for an answer. There wasn’t a solution through-out the internet, since Vista was considerably new at the time, so the only thing it came to my mind is a repair. BUT I only had a disk from Windows Vista Home Basic without the repair menu in it and I’m not sure why, but all of the notebooks do not include a windows disk with them even when you buy it with licensed OS. So I searched around and luckily found a download for only the recovery Vista DVD:

http://ashrafmahmud.blogspot.com/2008/07/windows-vista-recovery-disk-bootable.html

or here:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

FIX: These are only the recovery tools from windows vista.

Burn the one which suits your Vista(32bit or 64bit) to a disc

Boot from it(restart the computer, at boot time after the logo is displayed you should press a button which is specific to every PC(usually Del, F2, F10 etc) and under the Boot Options menu, change the priority of boot devices to your CD/DVD Optical Disk.

After Vista Recovery CD is loaded choose Repair and it should detect the problem automatically. Something like: “Your windows installation requires repair” will come up to which you answer yes and you are done.

If this doesn’t work, you could try choosing Command Prompt from the repair menu and then enter these commands:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot