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#1
How do I recreate a System Reserved Partition?
Here is a description of what I think the problem is. These occurred over 2 years. Item #11 is my question, the rest is background.
1)Installed Windows 7 upgrade from Windows XP and kept a dual boot system for several months.
2)Changed the BCD to make it just boot to Win7.
3)Later deleted Win7 from my computer.
4)I needed to reinstall Win 7, but it wouldn’t accept the product ID. Microsoft support said it was because XP was no longer present. They helped me solve that problem.
5)I later migrated Win 7 & other programs (all data are on separate HDDS) to a new SSD
6)Moved image of boot drive to a larger SSD, expanded the primary partition on the new drive to make the additional storage available.
7)Removed the old, smaller SSD from the computer, and kept it as a backup.
8)In the process of combining 2 partitions on a 3TB drive I noticed 100MB used for a System Reserved Partition. The SSD boot drive does not have one & neither Win7 or WinXP were on that HDD, so I didn’t think it was used. I booted from a repair disk and used diskpart to delete that partition and another tool to merge it with the primary partition.
9)Now, Win 7 on my new SSD hangs at the splash screen. Trying to repair using my original Windows 7 installation disk doesn’t work (and it wants to resurrect Win XP, which no longer exists except in the depths of the registry).
10)I’m back to running on the smaller SSD (Corsair Force 120 MB) I kept as a backup.
11)I know I can do a fresh install on the unbootable large SSD (Crucial M4 250 GB), but I'm concerned that I will have to first install XP & then the Win7 upgrade. That's a pain even though I have a slipstream SP3. Is there a way to recreate the System Reserved Partition and avoid that? Or is it likely something else is causing the problem?
Thanks for any help you can render