Computer Locked up, restarted and now wont boot

Hi Guys,

This is my first time on 7 forums, so please bear with me. I realize that my thread name isnt the best, but I didnt know where else to put this. Mods, please feel free to move this thread as you see fit.

My wife was playing TF2 with me a few days ago when her computer locked up, and I mean completely locked up. No task manager...no nothing. The mouse wouldn't even move. I did a hard reset on the computer. It posted past the bios and I got a blinking white cursor on a black screen and the computer seemed stuck there.

Fast forward a bunch of trouble shooting....

I installed an old IDE drive I had laying around and got win7 on it. Computer boots into win7 (ide drive) and I can open "My Computer" and see the SATA drive and all the files on it....strange

I boot off of the win7 disc and do "startup repair"...it does...something...

Now I can boot and select the IDE drive and it brings up the windows master boot record, which wasnt available till after i ran the repair for the win7 disc. Now I can select the windows that is installed on the SATA drive. Windows loads and everything seems to run normally.

So I unplug the old IDE drive and reboot and I get the message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

So I restart and boot from the win7 disc and run repair again, this time with the IDE HD unplugged. The "live disc" doesnt see my windows installation on the SATA drive, but I click repair anyway...and it does....something.

So I restart and get the same error.

I tried clicking "Load Drivers" that is available from the repair screen but I cant find a driver for the specific hard drive (SP2504C)...so I dont do that.

I tried loading the startup repair and going into the CMD and running the command "bootrec /fixmbr" and the prompt spit out "command succesfully completed"....but the computer still gives me the "DISK BOOT FAILURE BLAH BLAH" errror message after the post.

Im normally pretty good at fixing hardware/software problems on windows but this one has really thrown me for a loop. I could probably just wipe the drive and reformat and I bet it would work, but I would really like to solve it plus it will take forever to re-download all of her steam games and other stuff. If anyone has any tips, advice or things I should try, please let me know.

Hello deadburdock and welcome to Seven Forums.

One of the Forum experts prepared these troubleshooting guides that may help.

Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

If you have a system image of your wife's computer that might be the quickest solution (providing you're not dealing with a failing hard drive or some other hardware issue.)

Turns out I had partition problems.

Through some information found in the tutorials listed above and a few other places, i was able to use diskpart to set the active partition. Then I was able to run startup repair from the install DVD to fix the boot manager. Everything is working properly now. thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

That's great news! Thanks for posting back.