I should be worried (interesting repair techniques)

This post might properly belong on forum.thinkpads.com, but their registration is so draconian I don't feel like getting an account...

I resized my partition on my X61t with the idea of experimenting with linux. Since the vista partition shrinker would only give me 777 MB on a system with 64 GB free, I used GParted. Naturally, I didn't read every forum post first before trying it out.

I ended up with a system that wouldn't boot and gave me a message saying there was an error with winload.exe, code: 0xC00000255. No DVD drive. No way to run Windows Repair. Rats.

I loaded the recovery partition, but there isn't much useful there on the face of things. I tried lots of things - making a USB hard drive version of a Vista Home disk I own, trying to figure out how to make a network boot, and so on. No luck.

Then I looked around the rescure and recovery disk a little more closely. I realized from what I was reading that this was running Windows RE (or maybe it's Windows PE). And it had an Opera browser.

From the browser, I figured out I could run any executable. Just Open, select "all files," then right click on the executable you're interested. Select Run as Administrator. You can even create short cuts and edit them to add parameters. Though you can also just run a cmd.exe, so maybe that's not necessary. One key is that running from a ram drive partition that you'll see there (X is much more productive. I couldn't get the c: cmd.exe to run...

I tried doing a checkdsk c: /f with no luck.

Then I started playing with BootRec.exe. I didn't want to do BootRec.exe /fixboot c:, though in retrospect this might have been the right thing to do.

Instead, I did a BootRec.exe /rebuildbcd.

I rebooted. At first I thought, No Dice. The "error in winload.exe" and 0xC0000255 came up again. So I rebooted back to the recovery partition... hitting F11 at the ThinkPad screen...

And a curious thing happened...

My windows Vista boot came up. I could log in normally. My system was running normally.

I don't seem to have a way back into the recovery partition since F11 now takes me to my system, though the recovery partition looks like it's there. This could be a problem in the future.

Any ideas what I did? What should I properly have done? Anyone know where the executable for Windows Repair actually lies? I could have run that and I think it would have worked fine.

Any ideas on how I should restore access to my recovery partition?

Thanks!
Rudy
(sorry for the longwinded post)