Vista not booting "bootmgr compressed" I can compress it but cant read it later

Superb thing happened to me the other day

I have installed Vista on my system drive which was only 10 GB in size, So i am always short on space since beginning. After moving all the optional things like pagefile and index location i am able to fit vista in there.

So for freeing up some space i compressed my system drive . It gave some warning regarding this but i ignored them. Very stupid thing as it turned out.

So after the days work(??) i switched off the computer and went to sleep.

Next the comp refused to boot stating that the bootmgr(a file it uses to boot) is compressed and it does not like the boot files to be touched and advised me to press ALT+CTRL+DEL to restart the comp.

Now everybody and their kids know the ALT+CTRL+DEL restarts the comp, and how is this thing gonna improve the situation is not stated. Carrying out the order takes us back to the same message. Some helpful(recursive) message this.

Now some net searching about this revealed it to be a very generic and unsolved problem. It plagues both XP and Vista it seems. They ask permission for useful things like defrag an scandisk but allow such a destructive operation to be carried out by anyone.

The solution to this as i found out here

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-bootmgr-missing.html

was :

compact /u c:\bootmgr

compact /u c:\ntldr

from the command prompt thru XP or Vista recovery console by booting from the XP ot vista install disk.

I got to the point of entering the password for windows but failed there since i dont use password for my login and dont remember any password i might have entered while installing.

Then i tried to change the compressed drive parameter from Ubuntu but it does not seem to have any option for that.

How do you undo an operation

Best way to undo any operation is to reverse the steps done. Right.

So i took my hard disk to friends place, Attached it there, ran the above commands for my drive and also by the GUI to be sure about it.

Came back . Started comp and it STARTED.

So much excitement for a very silly thing to do . I mean when you are so short of space that you have to compress entire drive, its best to get a new hard disk.

I really need to get two HDD and get them working in RAID 0 very soon now.