Windows 7 - Invalid system partition

Hi
My Brother's Laptop was having this same Issue
He has done Partitioning of the C: Drive (Only Drive in System, which was shipped. I strongly suggest DELL to have at least made 2 Partitions, before shipping the LAP)

After doing the partitioning using 'Partition Wizard' and rebooting System shows following Error.

"PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable"
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM

If you are getting this Error, don't try Reinstallation as 1st Option; Use it as Last Option

I have searched in NET and tried all options. Went through the almost every option in following site :- http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/3247.shtml

Tried, Hitting the Hard Disk Area of the Laptop, Changed the BIOS bootup in every Sequence to all possible combination, and tried to repair the Startup boot area using WIN 7 CD
WITHOUT any success.

Then i checked the Repair log (Windows 7 installation DVD and boot from your DVD drive-->Select Default Language etc. and Click Next-->Click on the "Repair your Computer" option -->Repair Startup Boot Area. After Finishing view the log and if you are seeing that some repair happened on the BOOT Area and its Successful, But when booting again, System not coming up then Follow the procedure below

Issue due to: - Windows 7 - Invalid system partition:-

Steps to Resolve
================
1) Insert the Windows 7 installation DVD and boot from your DVD drive. You may have to change the boot order through system BIOS to boot from your DVD.

2) Choose your default "Language," "Time" and "Keyboard Input" on the first window and click "Next."

3) Click on the "Repair Your Computer" option to gain access to the System Recovery window.
Now choose "Command prompt" to run the Bootsect.exe utility. Bootsect is located inside the boot folder so change your directory to boot.


% Diskpart (DO NOT Type %, Its Prompt!!!)
Press enter

Diskpart> lis vol

Press enter

Now Find the volume letter or Volume Number which contains any System Partition (It may be C: or D: or E: OR 1 or 2 or 3 )

Diskpart> sel vol D ( or sel vol 1 , obviously use the correct letter or number)

then press enter

Diskpart> act

next, type just these three letters,

Diskpart> exi

Then press enter - to leave diskpart.

Close command prompt. Take the DVD Out. Restart Lap/PC.

If you are getting the following Error during next restart

"NTLDR is missing crtl+ alt+ delete to restart”
Then follow the below procedure

Go to Command Prompt (Steps 1 -3, above)
Type following in Cmd Prompt.
% bootsect /nt60 ALL
then press enter
(This is Safest one, although you can use bootsect /nt60 C:\,bootsect /nt60 SYS etc.. )

Eject the DVD and restart your computer. Your computer should now boot Windows 7 again.
I have done this Procedure and it was Great Success after 5-6 Hrs of continuous Struggle
I tried it as last option and would have re-installed the OS , if this would have not been a success

Thanks a LOt Guyzzzz..... ..It worked Like Charm..

Thanks to SIW2 for posting this procedure and the following Websites/links

1) How to Repair the MBR on Windows 7 | eHow.com
2) Invalid system partition

Regards,
-Joice

Just like to post a massive thank you to SIW2 - i was having the same issue around Win 7 not booting, the system partition missing from my C drive, and the system recovery tool not finding the drive and being unable to solve it!

Had been searching around for the last couple of hours, this solved it perfectly! Thanks again!

Hi Zazantaka,

Thanks for the update.

Glad it worked for you.

Hello SIW2, First off, thank you for the help. This happened to me recently. I followed these instructions and the fix worked great about a week ago. Since then, my wife was using the computer. She had Google Chrome up and running, and she plugged in our digital camera. At that point, Google Chrome crashed, and then the whole computer crashed shortly after that.

I have tried to follow these steps, but after doing the Diskpart commands, I continue to just get the "BOOTMGR is missing" notice.

When I try to run system repair from my Windows 7 DVD, it won't work because it says:

"If you have recently attached a device to this computer, such as a camera or portable device, remove it and restart your computer. If you continue to see this message, contact your system administrator (You've just been dubbed my 'system administrator' by the way, congratulations! lol jk) or computer manufacturer for assistance."

We unplugged the camera immediately upon the crash. In addition, we unplugged any other USB connected devices such as the printer and web cam as well.

When I run the lis vol command, I get the following volumes, and part of me thinks the computer is holding onto the camera as a drive that shouldn't be there or something, wondering if maybe I should try deleting the drive. Here is my list of drives:

Vol 0 - G - DVD-ROM
Vol 1 - C - System Rese - NTFS - Partition - 100 MB
Vol 2 - F - "Blank" - NTFS - Partition - 111 GB
Vol 3 - D - Backup Driv - NTFS - Partition 596 GB
Vol 4 - E - Files Drive - NTFS - Partition 596 GB

Originally, Drive E was my "Files Drive" and drive F was my "Backup Drive", but it looks like now Drive D is the Backup Drive and F is now considered blank with only 111 GB or whatever. Any thoughts or direction of what to do at this time?

Ok, I have an update that seemed to fix this problem very quickly. I just booted up into the BIOS settings. I went into the BOOT orders, selected the Hard Disk Drive selection.

From there I noticed it had re-ordered my hard drives, so that my primary boot hard drive was listed as number 3, instead of number 1. I then selected F5 I believe on my computer, telling the computer to restore my boot order to its previous settings, and it restored the boot order, and my computer fired up immediately after saving.

Hopefully this helps someone else in the future.

I had cloned my windows 7 partitions to a new 1 TB drive from an older 250 GB drive that was beginning to fail.

(I also have Linux Mint on another drive.) Windows C drive had a boot sector, and no matter how many times I ran the Windows 7 repair disk, it could never find the system partition and repair the boot sector.

Finally, I hit F8 when the Windows 7 system disk was loading and I was able to select "Last Known Good" because there was a point when the Operating system when it was on the 250 Gb older drive that Windows 7 had loaded succesfully.

I was even using the command prompt and doing BCD repair commands.

Lo and behold, the boot sector was found, and upon reboot and the Windows Repair Disk repaired the boot files on the system partition..... yadda yadda yadda, I was able to boot into Windows 7 successfully.

I had to rebuild the ACLs, but basically, Windows 7 x64 is running smoothly - aside from a few problems with my graphics card drivers.

Although perhaps I could have prepared the cloning target drive with sysprep so I would have a new SID. However, I couldn't boot into the cloning source (old Windows 7 installation) drive.

I am not sure the problem I am having but I believe it is similar. My PC is running 2 HDD in raid 0 and a third HDD for storage. The raid drives are split into 3 partitions. 1 has WinXP, 1 has Windows 7 Ultimate, and the other is storage. When I went to wake up my computer the other morning nothing happened. So I hit restart. When it booted it went into the please put in system disk and repair thing. I put in the disk and go past the language settings then I load the drivers for my raid controller. No operating system is listed. So I click next and went into command prompt and diskpart and made sure the partition with Windows 7 is active. I then ran the startup repair and rebooted and I am not getting the

BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Any ideas on what I should do next? When I ran the repair cd again it still not operating system is listed after the language settings? Do I need to keep selecting the correct partition and then keep running the startup repair utitlity? Everytime I do it gives me the same results "The partition table doesn not have a valid system partition" as the root cause in the results

Update. So I went back into diskpart and selected the partition with WinXP on it and now it will boot. Unfortunately I still get the same results with running the startup repair utility. "The partition table does not have a valid system partition" I have run the startup repair a bunch of times. Do I just need to keep loading it over and over and not try booting windows in between attempts? I have it set to boot from the cdrom first then hdd second. So after I run the startup repair I am removing the disk to see if it will boot. Is this the correct procedure?

So I figured it out. I was using the storage hard drive to load the RAID drivers because startup repair would not recognize my thumb drive. I used a different thumb drive and plugged it in before starting up the computer. I also unplugged the storage hard drive to make sure Windows 7 would not find it. Loaded raid drivers, startup repair then found my Windows 7 installation and fixed it first run. I think it erased my WinXp dual boot though. I am guessing that may not be to difficult to fix.

Thank you, had this issue and solve it thanks to you guys!