Right. So. Basically I had just formatted a partition (I was in Windows7), which I know had WinXP (although not working) with Acronis Disk Manager. I then extended the partition on the same drive as the partition i'd just formatted, over the newly formatted partition. To give me the whole drive. This was done on the restart by Acronis. It also changed the last 2.3GB partition to a drive letter of X: (it was unassigned before). Acronis went through all that, said successful then rebooted the PC. Only, now just after bios etc JUST as it would normally go to the screen for me to choose my Win7 or WinXP install to boot into - it shows this screen. CTRL+ALT+DEL does nothing. Responds to nothing. I've tried using Win7 disk to revert back to a previous state, also start up repair (which says there isn't anything wrong). Anyone have any ideas? OHHHH I'm not gonna be happy if i've lost all of the stuff on these drives. :/ Any help appreciated guys..
Plug in another hard disk, format that, plug old disk back in, save files if not already lost. Sorry can't be more helpful, best wait for next forum member to chip in.
I think it's due to the partition you did It's probably corrupted the whole disk.. I'm not sure.. I never ran in this problem.. then again I never did any partition stuff..
Whats annoying is the drive that I partitioned isn't a boot drive. Just data. It boots to a different drive to Win7, which I did absolutely nothing to. :/ Hmm, will have to keep working' on it :s
Reboot and Select proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key_ ^_^ Argh It had in BIOS. CD as first boot and Removable Media 2nd, 3rd was PS-Samsung HD (I left it in SATA3 slot, that not ok?) - tried with PS-Samsung HD first… Same error as "Reboot and select…" Plugged into SATA1 it also shows up that error. "Reboot and select…" etc.
That would indicate the boot sector on what ever device the BIOS is trying to read is messed up. This type of behavior is common when leaving memory sticks plugged in that didn't have (because they didn't need) a 'correct' boot sector. Recommend booting the windows install disk and running fixmbr or what ever the command is.
With only the boot drive connected, going into the Windows Recovery and command prompt and use bootrec.exe to enter the boot recovery options. The two commands I would use are fixmbr (repair the Master Boot Record) or fixboot (replace the entire MBR). You can also go into a live linux to see if the partition is accessible, however since you said the Windows repair utility said that there is nothing wrong then I would assume that the file structure is intact and that the problem lies with an incorrect boot configuration.
Right, i've got a LiveCD for Ubuntu ready to check it after this. But i've tried as you suggested above. However, with just the Windows7 drive plugged in, when I go through Win7 CD to repair etc - It doesn't see my Win7 install. Nothing there. If I just click next and go to command prompt anyway, it shows it being in "X:\Sources" if I do bootrec.exe while there it says.. "Repairs critical disk structures. The following commands are supported: /FixMbr /FixBoot /ScanOs /RebuildBcd " None of them do anything when typing in, just not recognised. I'm going to go into LiveCD to see what the drives are. But this is a little puzzling. :/ Windows 7 was on C as far as I know, is cmdprompt always on X: ? X: shows Setup.exe, Program Files, Sources, Users and Windows files. I'm assuming it is the CD?
You need to run the executable from whatever source it is from and X:\Sources is the correct parameter if X is your CD drive. However You have to select the desired OS, but as you say there is no windows install displayed. Have you tried system restore? This may restore the files correctly but should not affect the partition you have changed. Failing that, if Windows cannot recognise an OS or recognise any problems you may have to do a reinstall but see what Linux comes up with.
ok, so i've got it seeing Windows 7. It says however under Partition Size "0MB" - Location D:\ Local Disk … I had to change the booting device to SM for it to see Win7. I think i've borked my Win7 install with a ubuntu command trying to fix the mbr from there. :/ Although i'm not sure how it made it 0MB. And in ubuntu I could see all the files from Win7. I'm trying it again to see if its all still there along with all the other drives plugged in too.
I tried going back with system restore, like the previous "working" point. But that didn't work either. Yea, in ubuntu now and it shows the 2 other drives - SEEM fine. The 3rd drive, which had Win7 on is nowhere to be seen. AHHH BUGGER. Why did I bother with Ubuntu -_-
Looks like a Win7Reinstall unless theres a way to reverse my retardation in using Ubuntu. Thankfully it wasn't even fully set up and I haven't totally lost my data.. yet. I hope. Haha. Thanks for the help guys All suggestions were taken on board.
Did you back up all of your data before doing this? If so just format the drives and install Win7 again.
Yea, Win XP and the Data drive are the ones with 95% of stuff on. Win 7 was a fairly new install, I was just trying to sort the HDD's out a bit they were a mess. XP was backed up to move to a different drive. It didn't go entirely as planned. I need it to go on a drive as a letter G: otherwise everything it puts on the drive will be pointing to G: and not work. I don't know of any other way round this than simply changing the drive letter.
I think the lesson here is never try and mess about with partitions on hard drives that are in use. Sounds to me like the mbr wasn't as expected, and something has caused it to break. I had a similar thing, where because I had my external hard drive plugged in when re-installing windows, it decided to put the MBR on there. So then if the external drive wasn't turned on, the PC wouldn't boot. I have seen that same message before, but can't remember what, where, why or how I sorted it. Probably a reinstall as I always find that easier than faffing around.
Repair installation of Windows 7? It does sound like you've corrupted the entire partition, not just the boot information. Chkdsk /r to repair files and folder structures? For that to work they'd have to be recognizable, which I doubt, but worth a shot.
On this note, bootrec would have solved your issue, and it might just solve pete*'s, if the Windows 7 partition is intelligible enough.
