Windows 7 - Hard drive no longer bootable or detectable by Win 7...

Hi,

I'm running into issues recently with a number of Windows 7 pc's where the hard disk will no longer be accessible. If I use startup repair, it will fail and not detect the disk or not even reach the recovery options screen. If I plug the drive into another windows pc, it will want to initialize and format.I can plug the disk into a mac or linux and am able to read / write to the disk as normal. The only way i've overcome this so far is to reformat the drive.

Its not an ideal solution to backup and rebuild, hoping someone out there has more of an idea of what is going wrong.

Any takers?

Thanks,

Is this an external disk?

My guess would be that you lost the 'active partition' setting or the MBR does not find it. The active partition can be either the 100MB system partition or C: depending on your setup. I would check with the bootable CD of Partition Wizard what the story is. You can repair the MBR at the same time.

Thanks WHS, I will give that a try.