*sigh* I've come here precisely because Google didn't provide answers and I thought that's what forums were for anyway.

I've had ubuntu installed once, it sees there's a Vista partition but there's precious little to be gained from that. Clearly it relied on something set up with the XP partition to boot and once I shrank that drive it caused problems. I wish I'd never seen the forum post reply that told me XP had its own drive resizing tool in Disk Management, frankly. I still didn't do anything that should have been risky, why include the ability to resize drives if it is?

I did everything right but it highlights a weakness of imaging a drive and thinking you've got a failsafe backup ...

I love people who don't know the answer to something, but instead of admitting that they say "google" like they're being dismissive of someone who hasn't tried. "I could help but I'm not going to lower myself because you've got to learn how to solve your own problems" really means "I haven't a clue where to start but I couldn't let anyone see that I don't know the answer to everything to do with computers."

All I can do is try a repair install if it'll let me. I don't think there is any other way to fix this, I might as well face up to a clean install of Vista even though I really, really hate reinstalling Windows and always have. I feel like I've lost an arm until it's all back to normal again and it's just so much work, specially with Vista.