Computer no longer seeing windows!

agnes · 26 May 2010 at 08:01

Guys, last night I sorted out all my partitions and ghosted my windows 7 partition onto a new 250 gig drive so it has it's own hdd to run from and wiped the old partition on the 500 gig drive leaving that for storage.

Now, I did this in Hirens 10.4, when I boot my pc up without Hirens in, my **** dell doesnt see a bootable disk, but once I put hirens back in, and select boot from hard drive, it boots into windows no problem so the ghost has been all good. I just can't work out how my dell can't see the bootable disk.

I have checked the boot order, stuck the new 250 gig drive in sata port 0 so it's primary drive. I can see both 250 and 500 gig drives with stuff in...

It just won't see the windows as a bootable disk but Hirens does.

Any ideas?

ags

Moeks · 26 May 2010 at 08:15

Sounds like an issue with the master boot record to me.

agnes · 26 May 2010 at 08:22

Ooooo, didn't think of that batman!

Will have a looksi.

ags

Banzai_Joe · 26 May 2010 at 08:25

yeah, whenever i get similar issues i boot into recovery console (with cd usually) and fixmbr and/or fixboot

nayenshah · 26 May 2010 at 08:27

Banzai_Joe said:
yeah, whenever i get similar issues i boot into recovery console (with cd usually) and fixmbr and/or fixboot

+1 It would probably be safer to re-install. Formatting the sectors fully would also help.

Bremmy · 26 May 2010 at 11:24

Did you make the new partition active?

agnes · 26 May 2010 at 11:40

Sorry guys, forgot to update, all fixed, not sure why I didn't bother with boot repair to start with.

For those that might want to know this in future, to repair a non booting windows 7 you can do the following things if it's nothing to do with hardware:

Boot from your windows 7 disk, select languages, time and keyboard type, click next, will bring you to a new box with 2 selections in, select the top (allows you to use system repair tools), click next. Now you can either use CMD and type in bootsect which will show you a list of options for bootsect and what does what. Or click on start up repair at the top which does it automatically for you.

ags

matthab · 26 May 2010 at 13:23

nice to see sorting a fudged windows OS is now very easy. My windows 7 when i first got it used to BSOD on boot windows repaired it itself and now ive never had a problem.

adrichardson81 · 26 May 2010 at 13:52

I remember doing something similar in XP once - not fun!

agnes · 27 May 2010 at 00:36

Yea, it is nice seeing MS put in simple tools for people that know IT rather than the OS trying to do everything for you. I find it's a nice balance, at any point I can take control and sort the problem out or let the OS try it.

ags