New
#1
Windows 7 won't boot after erasing an old HD
Hello. I have a dell dimension 9100. I have two drives on it, a ~160gb drive that came with it with xp, and a 500gb drive with win7. I put the win7 in myself and had been using that. Finally, I decided to erase the old drive with xp on to install linux on it. After erasing the old drive, my computer won't start up. It says it cant find sata 1 or 3. I've tried switching the cables hooking up to it but that doesn't help. If I push continue after it tells me how it can't find them, it says 'loading pbr for descriptor 2...done' and stays there. I did not erase windows 7, I checked. Whats wrong? I erased the old drive so I could install ubuntu on it... I'm guessing since thats the drive the computer came with, I deleted the mbr... I have an external drive with ubuntu I can use to fix this. Before you say to use the windows install disk to fix it, I've already tried that. The repair utility doesn't scan and thus doesn't see my install.
The more I think about it, the more that it seems like its NOT an mbr thing. I think this because of the fact that the windows repair disk doesn't see any installation of windows.
The hard drive is not dead. I can read it via ubuntu. Sorry if this thread is hard to understand, I've copied and pasted on multiple forums
Heres the latest: Disabled all other sata's in the bios except the one the drive is plugged to. Now I no longer see sata3 not found or anything. After bios boot, it just shows a blinking cursor.