Windows 7: Windows failed to start and can't find operating system

You can get http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html and use parted magic's subprogram TestDisk to repair it. The step by step guide is TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity

It is a somewhat complicated process, but it is all laid out there for you to use.



Edit: updated the site to get ultimatebootcd. The downloads are in the mirrors at the bottom of the page.

Right now I pretty much have no idea what's going on, but guessing from what Diskpart says about Disk 0 I'm thinking what I did made my problem worse (no partitions?! where did C go?):

LIST DISK

Disc # / Status / Size / Free / Dyn / Gpt
Disk 0 / Online / 232 GB / 232 GB
Disk 1 / No Media / 0 B / 0 B

DETAIL DISK

Disk ID: 06094833
Type: SATA
Status: Online
Path: 0
Target: 0
LUN ID: 0
Location Path: (not going to type this unless it will be useful)
Current read-only state: No
Boot Disk: No
Pagefile disk: No
Hibernation file disk: No
Crashdump disk: No
Clustered disk: No

There are no volumes.

SEL DISK 0 -> LIST PART

There is no partitions on this disk to show.

writhziden, do you still recommend trying TestDisk?

I highly recommend trying TestDisk. I helped someone with a similar problem on an external drive earlier in the week, and I found that a partition recovery tool is the only possibility of recovering the lost partition (and in this case, the operating system as well).

Basically, it appears your partitions were deleted. TestDisk should be able to pick the partitions up that were deleted and recover the partitions.

Edit: The nice thing about having deleted the partitions, since you never reformatted the drive, everything is still on there and TestDisk should be able to recover the partition as NTFS instead of the RAW (unformatted) partition. Under no circumstances should you format your drive. That is imperative.

I'm planning to try TestDisk, but before I do that: can anyone please explain in simple terms what happened after I ran those commands in Diskpart? Before I had a rough understanding of what the results were saying - the C drive was there, but the computer couldn't recognize it because it was RAW, it was 232GB, etc. Now after running those commands I have NO clue why Disk 0 doesn't have any partitions or volumes or why it says C is Removable and has a No Media status...or why I got that "no bootable sectors" message. I'm not a tech person at all, so maybe this will teach me to run commands I don't understand, but I'd really appreciate any insight that can help me understand the current situation. What went wrong?

My guess is that since you did the third of the three steps first, it corrupted the boot data and deleted your partition. Then running all three again was unable to recover that corruption. I may be wrong, but this is my guess.

Edit: Deleted your partition is probably wrong. I think it hid the partition somehow. Anyway, I need to make a run to the store to pick up some last minute items for Thanksgiving. I'll be back to check on your progress with TestDisk. Good luck!

diskpart didn't screw up your disk. Those commands are display commands only.
Writing a new mbr and bootsector shouldn't be a problem as well. Maybe a stupid virus is the problem. try testdisk

I was speaking of this post:

and then this one:

I know it was not Diskpart that caused the problem.

Silvergreen, what's the status on the TestDisk? Any luck?

Well, it took me a while to run TestDisk (I had to ask for help from a friend) and just rebooted....only to get a new error message:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click next
3. Click "repair your computer."

Status: 0xc0000000e

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

Looks like I'm back where I started...?