Repartitioning and "disk read error"

Keywords: gparted, repartitioning, "disk read error"

I tried to shrink the NTFS partition on a 200GB hard drive with one
partition containing XP Home. I booted the Live gparted CD and used
it to reduce the partition to 137.4 GB. After doing this I cannot boot
up and get the error "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to
restart."

I added two additional partitions to the resulting unallocated space
using windows Disk Manager after booting the backup hard drive (I can
still read the repartitioned disk, just can't boot to it). I then
again repartitioned the original harddrive using the gparted Live CD
so that the primary partition was reduced to 74 GB. Still get the
same error when trying to boot.

Chkdsk reports no errors. Windows disk manager (running from a
UBCD4Win CD) shows primary partition to be active and all partitions
as being healthy. The only unusual thing is that when I run TestDisk
it reports the following

TestDisk Report
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 16 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
1 * HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 9594 254 63 154143612
[DISK2_VOL1]
2 E extended LBA 17901 0 1 24319 254 63 103121235
test_FAT : B


oot sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55
5 L FAT16 LBA 17901 1 1 23637 254 63 92164842
5 L FAT16 LBA 17901 1 1 23637 254 63 92164842
X extended 23638 0 1 24300 254 63 10651095
test_FAT : Boot sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55
6 L FAT16 LBA 23638 1 1 24300 254 63 10651032
6 L FAT16 LBA 23638 1 1 24300 254 63 10651032
/TestDisk Report

TestDisk's subsequent analysis of the the cylinders says everything is
okay. I have spent couple of days trying to solve this problem. I
have run fixboot from the recovery console, tried resizing the primary
partition to less than 137GB, and read all 16 pages of posts in this
thread http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/19004/

I have a backup hard drive of all the data and can still access the
data on the repartitioned drive so I can always start from scratch to
partition the original drive, but I'm interested in understanding the
problem and fixing the repartitioned drive if possible. I also want
to avoid the problem in the future (for myself or others since it does
seem to be a problem that occasionally occurs when repartitioning).
Does anyone know of any other tests I can run so that I can pinpoint
the problem and fix it rather than randomly trying different
approaches until one works?

Obviously TestDisk is showing some problems with the number of heads/
cylinders but I don't understand the implications of this. Also when
I first used gparted I can't remember if I told the program to "apply"
the operation after I indicated the desired new size for the primary
partition. I might have exited the program before I said to apply the
change but I'm assuming if I didn't hit "apply" then the program would
not have made the appropriate changes. Is this correct?

I haven't messed with the MBR since, again, I'm not sure of the
implications of doing this (will I lose data/programs ?).

Thanks for your help.