Windows 7: Can't get drive with new partitions to boot

I have been working on this all day. Found some great advice on this forum, however I have been unable to find anything that solves my situation.

I have 2 hard drive bays that allow me to cold swap drives and one internally installed backup drive called "Backup". I have three swappable drives labelled "Main" and "Spare" and "Simple" on the outside. All 3 drives have partitions that are labelled "Main 7" and "System Reserved" in windows 7.

Yesterday my desktop was running on the "Spare" drive. I started getting disk error messages. I did a full backup of the "Main 7" partition onto my backup drive. I ran chkdsk on "Spare" but received error that it was out of space. Reboot and files gone. Decided not to repair since having operating system issues lately anyway. Rebooted on "Simple" with "Main" in second slot. Wound up reformatting partitions on "Main". Created 100MB "System Reserved" and the remaining space was allocated to "Main 7". Using Acronis, I restored full backup onto "Main 7" partition of "Main" and restored older system backup onto "System Reserved" partition of "Main" and made this partition active.

Reboot and error message requesting boot disc. Reboot with Windows 7 Pro CD and no system listed to repair. Went through the repair / reboot three times and no changes. I can boot off "Simple" and see "Main", I just can't boot off "Main" only.



I tried bootsect from command line and get access denied error. Not sure how to get "Main" to be bootable. In the past I have cloned drives with Acronis, but now that "Spare" is corrupted, I am trying to restore each partition. I have included a screen capture of Disk Management for clarity.

Thanks so much for any help you can provide!

Rob

If you are attempting to use Disk 0 as a boot disk then your system reserved at 55MB is too small. It should be at least 100MB. I can't say if it is the cause of your boot problem but it will at least cause you problems down the track.

Thanks mjf. Disc 0 works fine for now, Disc 2 is the one I am having problems with. Since my "Spare" drive needs to be replaced now (not currently installed), I want to leave Disc 0 alone until I get Disc 2 able to boot on its own. That being said, can I change the size of the System Reserved partition without reformatting?

Back up all important data. Then use free Partition Wizard
Partition Wizard Bootable CD allows user to manage partition directly with partition manager bootable CD.
It's best to use the bootable CD for this.
You
1) Resize the partition to the right of system reserved giving a small amount of unallocated space (say ~200MB) at the end of the partition.
2) Resize the system reserved partition to give you ~200MB (better than the 100MB).
3) Resize the right partition to draw back any remaining unallocated.
This tutorial may help
Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

Great, I will give this a shot. How can I make Disc 2 boot on its own (without disc 0 installed)?

Disk 2 as in the disk management screenshot:
Edit: Disk 2 has no OS installed on the 2nd partition.

Yes Disc 2 from the screenshot. All the operating files are on the 2nd partition since I restored a full backup from the second partition of a drive that went bad (and was bootable). I included the MBR as well. So how can I get the OS on that drive to be recognized? I tried installing windows 7 from the DVD onto Disc 2 (it was Disc 0 during install) and then restoring the full backup but that didn't help.

According to the disk management screenshot your 2nd partition of disc 2 should show (Boot,pagefile,....) if it had the OS.
Try an image restore with just Disc 2 connected.
If you made an image from a suspect HDD (eg. failing) then you may need to just do a clean install.