Windows 7: Fairly advanced problem, need some help

Okey dokey,

first of all I'm new here, so hi there all.

Second of all, I have a fairly perplexing problem and was wondering if any of you guys know how to fix it.

Basically, I installed Windows 7 via Apple's Boot Camp facilitator on my Macbook while allocating 20GB's of space to the partition. It worked good enough, so I was pleased with it.

Recently, however, I decided to increase the partition size. Using a tool called Winclone which creates an image backup of the partition, I copied then erased and repartitioned the HD. Unfortunately WinClone has a bug where I am unable to restore the image. Now I'm left with the entire file system and contents of the original Windows 7 setup on a disk image file without a proper way of restoring it.

I tried copying the contents of the disk image over to the new partition, but I get an error when I try to boot from it, saying I should insert a boot disk and then press any key. I reckon this has something to do with the boot manager being incorrectly calibrated, right? I would really appreciate some help with this. Is there anything I can do to fix this problem without having to reinstall Windows 7??? (I don't have access to the disc right now)

Thanks in advance,



Jack

Welcome!

Try booting up your WIndows 7 install disc, and press SHift+F10 when you get to the language screen to pull up a command prompt. Then enter the following:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

You may also try a startup repair, either before or after the above commands.

Thanks for the prompt response!

Unfortunately I don't have my disc right now (and wont for a couple of months as I am away from the home base). I was wondering if there was a way to fix this via the system files? If I'm thinking straight W XP had the boot.ini file that would probably fix this.

Thanks!

You can create a repair disc instead.

System Repair Disc - Create

You may need to download the ISOs, as mentioned at the bottom, if you can't get to another 7 machine.

Maybe you can fix the MBR with EasyBCD

OK, I think I'll try to get a repair disc working. In the meantime, if anyone can give anything more on the subject, it would help a lot. Do you guys really think it has to do with what I suspect it to (the bootloader)?

An alternative may be to reinstall Windows 7 as you have originally done and then just copy your own files from the winclone image (if that image can at least be mounted).

Yeah, it can be mounted. I have copied over the files from the image and am going to burn a repair disk. That fixes the bcd right?

Thanks for all the help.

To fix the BCD, either run a startup repair, or run bootrec /rebuildbcd.