partition table looks different between Linux and Windows

Question

I'm having some odd issues after deleting and resizing an NTFS partition with Gparted. Windows doesn't seem to see the same partition table as Linux.

At first, the deleted partition showed up as 0-block partition of unknown type in fdisk. Since fdisk wouldn't let me delete it, I used sfdisk to do it manually.

The current status:

• fdisk shows 4 partitions
• gparted shows entire drive as unallocated
• Windows still sees the old partition table, can't find system files at their old location, thus fails to boot

What's puzzling me is that gparted's opinion conflicts with fdisk's.

Answer 1

GParted (or most tools built around libparted) tends to show any disk with even the most minor partition table error as empty. This makes this whole family of tools next to useless for recovering from partition table errors. You can ignore them for your current problem.

You'll have to post more information for a better diagnosis; the fact that fdisk shows four partitions and Windows sees a different partition table is much too little data. Post back with the output from the relevant tools -- cut-and-pasted text from fdisk (add four spaces to the start of each line to keep it properly formatted) and a screen shot of the Windows partitioning tool, for instance.