Vista Install Won't Boot after resizing partition; Missing/Corrupted winload.exe!?

[2Cold Scorpio]

I'm having a big problem with my Vista Ultimate install. I reinstalled last night, and have been spending today moving the bulk of my data from my Windows XP partition to the Vista partition, and resizing the two partitions (taking free space from the XP one to give free space to the Vista one) as needed. Vista worked perfectly fine before I did the bulk of the data transfers and two partition resizing sessions. The order of actions went like this:

1. Created new partition from free space of XP partition; installed Vista and all Windows Updates and drivers, security apps and some utilities (defrag software, CCleaner, etc.). Used Vista all morning with no issue. Defragged both partitions with Auslogics Disk Defrag.
2. Booted back into XP and used Acronis Disk Director to resize Vista partition to 100 GBs (from 35 GBs), shrinking the XP partition by the same.
3. Moved my music collection (about 85 GBs of FLAC and WMA Lossless files; I keep backups of all my CDs) from the XP to Vista partition (from within XP)
4. Resized partitions again to give Vista another 90 GBs; moved over my program installers archive (also pretty large due to lots of mods for games).
5. Try to boot back into Vista to do some housecleaning, and get the following message:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Install your WIndows installation disk and reboot.
2. Choose your language settings, click Next
3. Choose "Repair your computer"

File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000225
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupted

My question is: what do I do? Do I follow the instructions above? If so, how exactly do I do it (do I boot from the disk, or choose Vista from the bootloader and do something from there)? Also, most importantly, will this repair keep my data intact? If not, I'll reverse my partitioning resizes and move the files back to the XP partition for now.

Please help; I'd hat to lose those two directories, not to mention to have wasted a day and a half trying to re-migrate over to Vista.

[Splash]

Firstly verify your backups. You did backup before doing this, right?

Secondly do what it says - this *should* allow a new bootloader to be installed, and all will work happily ever after, but as is always the case when playing the partition game there *is* a risk that it'll go wrong (be it through power failure, pc crash etc etc etc) and you'll be left looking at the joy that is data recovery.

[2Cold Scorpio]

Good news is that using the install disk did work fine (though I'll have to edit the text in the bootloader to get rid of the (Recovered) text that was added). Good thing too, because unfortunately, I'm doing this whole operation by the seat of my pants (meaning, no backups! ).

Hopefully, I'll only have to resize the partitions one more time to finish up...and hopefully it won't jack anything up. Thanks for the help; I was wanting to make sure my data would stay intact if I used the repair function (it did).

Further research showed me this kind of thing is pretty common with Acronis TrueImage (which I'm not using but have installed), so it seems sometimes Disk Director can do the same thing. Maybe my ordeal will be of help to others.

[Splash]

Good to hear you didn't lose any data, but (apologies if you've heard it all a million times before) you should *always* take a backup before performing anything which adds risk to your data, and preferably all the time, as a matter of course. The Vista backup utility is actually pretty decent, so you needn't splurge on 3rd party tools if you don't want to.

[2Cold Scorpio]

Believem e, if I didn't feel I needed to do it now, even without backups, I wouldn't have. Problem was XP has been acting very odd lately. In addition, I'd been getting the itch to give Vista another chance (I'm liking it a lot better this time around), so rather than do an XP reformat, I decided to reinstall Vista, piggyback everything over in 80 GB chunks (adjusting partitions as needed from there), and just leave XP as a skeleton install (for legacy games/apps that won't work in Vista) until Windows 7 comes, and then it'll be wiped out completely and I'll repeat this process, moving everything over to Win 7 (hopefully with a new external HDD next time ).

Luckily, I only have one partition resize left to do (after I picked XP clean of installed games).