Solved MBR Missing, but no operating system to choose when I try to repair

So last night I was listening to iTunes when all of a sudden my music stopped and the hard drive light stayed on steadily. I decided to reboot the computer, and lo and behold when the BIOS splash screen went away, it said the "master boot record missing, press ctrl + alt + del to reboot" or something to that effect.

I quickly looked up how to repair this, and it seems like the Windows 7 installation disc is really good about repairing problems nowadays, so I gave that a shot after following instructions on some website. I hit "repair my computer" and then I tried to choose an operating system, but there were none in the list! How can I get my operating system to show up so I can choose to repair it using the installation disc?

I had something like that happen and it turned out to be the controller on the SSD. Beware early Sandforce.........Hope your problem is not the same.

Ugh, I am using a Crucial 128 GB SSD. It's only 7 months old and supposedly very reliable. Do you think my SSD is toast?

I am not sure but I don't think Crucial used Sandforce. I'm am sure that if you do a search of your model number there will be something......Hopefully good! Mine was a Mushkin and was 9 months old.

Follow the tutorial (method 2) : http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html

Mark the Windows partition (diskpart must to find it) as active . Then run startup repair, for at least three times with restart after every single run.

Problem solved. The SSD needed to be power cycled. The reason I was getting the MBR missing error was because the SSD wasn't being recognized by the BIOS. As a result, the computer was trying to boot from my external HD, which has nothing on it except data.

Anyway, after unplugging the external HD and leaving the computer off overnight, it booted up fine this morning with a "Windows did not shut down normally" warning message. Things seem fine now. Lesson learned, however: Ordered a large HD to run more stable nightly backups to from now on.

In case others stumble across this thread and have an SSD with similar problems, I wanted to add a bit of information. For those not familiar with an SSD power cycle:

SSD Power Cycle: