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Can't install Win7 after KillDisk wiped. BOOTMGR & DVD driver missing.
OK, I was a fool. My warning to others: do not use "Active KillDisk" to erase your system hard-disk if you want to install Windows-7. Mea culpa. I listened to someone I shouldn't have. Live, learn, and teach others.
OK, what's done is done, spilt milk, water over the dam. (Don't let it happen to you.)
Here's where I'm at now:
I got a used Lenovo Thinkpad T520 on CraigsList, that had a bogus Windows 7 Home Edition on it, and also seemed to have another partial copy of Windows that someone had tried to delete.
I own a Windows-7 Pro 64-bit DVD, so rather than take any chances on a used PC, I decided to erase the HDD and start over. I know now that I should have just used Format on the installation, but a misinformed acquaintance convinced me to use his Active KillDisk, c.2006, to remove all traces on the hard-disk, so I did. Da*n. So I erased the 500g HDD using the KillDisk FreeDOS dvd (which took 2 hours, writing "0" on the whole disk).
Now, when I try to install Windows-7 (64bit Pro), I get the following errors:
"Load Driver: a required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver ... insert it now." [No matter where I look, it doesn't find a driver for it. We tried using an external USB-dvd, same thing. We tried changing the boot-order, no difference.]
"Error code = 0x0 Root cause: the partition table does not have a valid System Partition. Repair action: Partition table repair. Result: completed successfully." [Note: this did not solve the problem.]
"Root cause found: Boot manager is missing or corrupt. Repair action: File repair. Result: Failed. error code = 0x15."
"Startup Repair:
Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385 . [etc. snipped...].
Problem Signature 07: MissingBootManager OS Version 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1 Local ID: 1033."
"BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart." [repeats ad infinitum]
Somehow the KillDisk or Installation did manage to create some partitions (an X: drive, etc.), but they didn't seem to work. So we ran KillDisk again, oops, back to square one... I'm wondering if a more recent version of KillDisk might work better? Worth a try?
I've googled a lot and found various suggestions (many on SevenForums, which seemed to help some users!), and I've tried all I've found so far, to no avail. (Some were obvious, e.g. use an external USB dvd and swith it from USB3 to USB2, didn't work. Set UEFI/Legacy to Legacy only, didn't work. Change ACHI to Compatibility for DVD, didn't work. Use Repair instead of Install, and repair the disk, didn't work (though it did give me some useful error messages, above). Try installing in safe mode, didn't work. We tried playing with various other BIOS configuration settings, didn't help.
I think (but am not sure) that I need to repartition and reformat the HDD?? I've never done that before, so am not sure what it means or how to do it, etc. (How many partitions to create, on my 500g drive? Is just one OK? Are there different kinds of partitions -- boot, etc? Can Win7 do it automatically?) I tried from my Installation DVD, but this doesn't seem to work. Is there another way? I have a very old and very slow backup PC I can use some, e.g. to download something onto a USB memory stick, then maybe get FreeDOS running on the Lenovo?
I really need to use the laptop soon, for work. (It's a replacement for an older Lenovo whose hard-drive crashed. I'm hoping I can still recover the data, but that's down the road.)
Has anyone been through this before, and is there a clear way to proceed? Many thanks!!
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