Insert Boot Disc

Hello:

I have Windows 7 on a AMD Phenom Machine.

Hard Drive died so I put another one in and restored Windows with Acronis True Image.

When I leave the Windows repair disk in the drive, the restored system starts perfectly, runs perfectly etc. But if I pull that repair disk out of the drive I get this error about "No Bootable Device" "Insert Disc". So in other words that repair disk has to be in the drive, else I get the error.

I have already:

1. Verified that the boot sequence points to my Windows Drive
2. Run system repair. That's useless. It just tells me everything is fine.
3. Run bootrec fixmbr, vixboot, rebuildbcd. No problems found
4. Run Chkdsk. No problems found.

And about a million other things.

What should I do?

Thanks.

Michael

Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times will not work until the Win7 partition or it's 100mb System Reservd boot partition (preferred if you have it) is Marked Active first .

Thanks for you reponse. I did the thing with the repair disk. Every time it says that everything is fine. And yes, the system will boot as long as the repair disk is physically in the optical drive. But if you pull it out. Then you get "boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter" as the error.

I have been reading about this nightmare and I ran into this command called bootrec rebuild or something like that. The command is supposed to show how many windows systems are on your system. Well mine always shows zero. Even if you flag a partition as active the asterisk eventually disappears.

This is driving me nuts because the system works but it just won't boot.

By the way I have already tried this with another drive and the exact same thing happens.

Thanks again.

Michael

Greg:

Thanks for your response. When the drive died, I shied away from doing the reinstall because I couldn't find the Product Code (I usually keep these. I have about a million from the nineties - go figure). I did look up the product code with one of those download things. Don't know whether it brought back the right code. But I'm getting off track here.

Here is the snippet of the drives. Now before you laugh I didn't set them up that way. When I did the Windows system restore on the new drive things got kind of disjointed but there you have it. By the way I have Acronis True image too. Didn't use that here. So what you're looking at is the plain Jane Windows 7 Recovery result.

As far as what is in the partitions.

Application is just programs. Things that you would buy and install like Microsoft Office utilities, etc.

Personal is photographs and things like that.

The unallocateds I don't know anything about.

Crap is nothing. There used to be an old Windows XP installation there, but it is gone. So crap is empty.

Backup is just what I was hoping would avoid occasions like what we're discussing. Just Windows and Acronis backups.

The repair disk is the CD that supposedly fixes Windows 7.

Thanks again for your response.

Michael

Greg: Did what you said on everything up to the point where you said swap the drives. That's because B is on an ide drive. So should I just unplug that? All other drives are SATA.

That makes it even more important that B is unplugged during the repairs.

You can leave C where it is, just make sure it becomes set to boot first because now B is set to boot first since it holds the System boot files. Then mark C Active and run 3 separate Startup Repairs with reboots in between to check all parameters and run all fixes.

Once you replug B make sure no partition on it ever becomes marked Active, or it may hijack boot files during a repair or reinstall. Better to always unplug other HD's during repairs or reinstall.

greg:

couldnt get windows to boot even after a bunch of repair sessions. So used diskpart to mark active. But flag keeps resetting. Ran rebuild rcd and it show zero active installations. cant make flag stay.

Oh I should mention that partition wizard leaves about 8 mg to the left of c. No matter how you shove c down to the left 8 mg stays to the left of c

The only reason Active flag would not stay on C is if it has not yet been converted to Primary. Check now.

Where else does the Active flag go if it wont' stay on C? There are no other partitions since you've deleted D and unplugged all other HD's, correct?

I've never heard of Active flag not staying put. Please respond to these questions as you've apparently missed a step.

The OS will not repair and Start without the Active flag being on C.