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#1
Windows 7 not booting (Disk read error)
Recently, I was messing around with my HDD's partitions in GParted. I resized my Windows 7 partition and made a new NTFS for Windows XP, and a new ext2 for Puppy Linux. I installed the GRUB Bootloader and all my partitions booted fine off of it except for Windows 7. I later found out this has something to do with the Master Boot Record and that I should install GRUB and then install Windows 7. I was okay with this for a while, but Windows XP couldnt boot many applications from the Windows 7 partition because I have it's x64. I eventually realized that I hadn't made my Windows XP partition large enough (only 3 gig) for anything I wanted to do with it. After a few days, I just deleted the Windows XP and Puppy Linux partitions and was back to having just my Windows 7 partition. I was hoping everything would be magically better, but when I restarted my computer, the BIOS told me a "disk read error" had occurred and "press any key to restart".
I put in a Puppy Linux Live CD and opened up GParted again. GParted showed me that my HDD was now just one big block of Unallocated space. Then I looked in the lower-left corner of the screen and saw that I still had 4 partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4). sda1 is now my Windows 7 partition, sda2 is now my Windows XP partition, and for some reason sda3 and sda4 are both HP Recovery partitions.
I tried everything I could think of to save myself. I popped in the Windows 7 Upgrade Disk (I had been running Vista before) and tried the Recovery tools included with it, but the Recovery didn't recognize any partitions on my HDD at all. I ran a Command Prompt and tried all the options in bootrec fixmbr, but two of them didnt work and the other two replied "Element not found". Then I tried sfc /scannow, but that told me I had to be running Windows. I booted back into Puppy, ran GParted, and tried to make a new partition, but GParted told me that doing so would erase ALL data on the HDD. There's probably some more options I tried, but I can't remember them right now.
Can anyone help me out? I feel like I'm close to just backing up my personal files, wiping the HDD, and starting over. Only problem is I don't have anywhere to backup 150 gigs :\
Help!
Splunkin