partition resize breaks EFI USB installer

Question

I have a 64GB GPT USB stick, containing EFI installer partitions for Windows 7, Windows 10, 5 linuxes, and a Clover BootLoader to launch an El Capitan installer for Hackintosh. It all works absolutely perfectly and as a support specialist means I have everything on one drive which I keep in my wallet.

So what's the issue?

As soon as I resize any of the partitions using gparted (version 0.19.0-3build1), the problem occurs. Resizing completes without error. gdisk shows no error, everything seemingly is perfect.

The problem is that following a resize (can be of any partition on the disk), when I reboot and boot into the windows 7 EFI installer, it now complains there is a problem with Microsoft/Boot/BCD (missing or corrupt). No amount of coaxing or resizing back to how it was will make any difference. The files are NOT corrupt, they are perfectly intact. The only way to fix it is to delete the partition and re-add it, then retransfer the files.

Am i missing something? Why should resizing a partition break things in this way. The linux installers are unaffected. It only affect windows.

Thanks Pingers.

Answer 1

If anyone should come across this, I discovered the problem months later.

This is to do with gparted resizing and fat32 partitions. If you resize a fat32 partition from gparted within linux, all appears well - ie the partitions all mount just fine and all files are perfectly read/writeable. However, as soon as you look at the drive in Windows, the partitions become RAW and you are prompted to format. So gparted has a different idea about partitioning fat32 than windows does and the 2 do not agree.

I solved it by doing any fat32 resizing from within windows (well a windows vm which sufficed) and both operating systems are then happy.

gparted rocks, but stinks at windows partition resizing. Same same even with the latest gparted build 0.26.