Did something very stupid, now I cannot boot my computer.

I have a Win7x64 machine that boots on an SSD and has 3 additional hard drives. The second hard drive has some program files and the third and fourth are for data.

I found that my backups weren't working and decided to use the Windows backup. This failed and during my debug found that there is a system partition on my boot SSD that is 100MB. The suggestion was to enlarge this partition to 450MB or so. I used a partition editor to do this ( STUPID ) and upon completion, my system won't boot. I removed the boot SSD and examined it on another computer. The data is there or appears to be, but somehow I hosed the drive and it won't boot.

I booted in the Win7 Installation disk, and ran the repair a bunch of times. The log file indicates that it should work, but it doesn't. After seeing a thread about running this three times, I did. In fact I ran it more than that. Then I found a thread about ruing the Bootrec.exe tool. I did that and it still wont boot. What happens when I boot this drive is a underscore appears on my monitor near the upper left.

So, any suggestions?

My present plan, while I wait for a genius idea from this forum, is to unplug drives 3-4 and install Win7 on a spare drive, and once it is booting, see if I can replace all the information on the drive that is booting with the information on my non-booting SSD. If that works, then I will see if I can replace that drive with the SSD and I will be back where I was before all the trouble hits.

If you have a better plan, let me know.

Until then, you know what I will be doing.

Paul

Maguscreed said:

You've destroyed the boot manager, you can try a startup repair as a simple first step but I don't think it will completely rebuild the bootmgr.
Startup Repair

Thanks for the kind advice, but that was the first thing I tried. No joy.

Paul

   Information

Boot up using the Startup Repair CD or Windows 7 DVD. (not the OEM manufacturer's Recovery Disk) If you have a Netbook, you will need a CD/DVD drive.
NOTE: Make sure no USB drives are plugged in.
Do not use a USB Pendrive for Startup Repair.
startup repair disc-create

1) Use the Rebuild BCD in this tutorial:
How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows


Attachment 184680 Attachment 184681

2) Restore MBR.

Attachment 184682

Maguscreed said:

You can try this method starting at step 4
Bootmgr is missing - Fix

I did that, but did it from the X drive. This is on my list to do if my current plan fails.

Thanks.

Paul

Can I ask you exactly what kind of partition editor you used? One like Partition Wizard (or EASEUS etc.) which moves and resizes partitions with their NTFS filesystems intact?

Or did you use a pure editor to directly alter the partition table in the MBR?

Can you tell us step by step how you proceeded with resizing your partitions? Which ones, from how much to how much, did you resize only or did you move their offsets as well?

Were you using a boot disc to manage the partitions outside of Windows?

Corazon said:

Can I ask you exactly what kind of partition editor you used? One like Partition Wizard (or EASEUS etc.) which moves and resizes partitions with their NTFS filesystems intact?

Or did you use a pure editor to directly alter the partition table in the MBR?

Can you tell us step by step how you proceeded with resizing your partitions? Which ones, from how much to how much, did you resize only or did you move their offsets as well?

Were you using a boot disc to manage the partitions outside of Windows?

I used EASUS, which advised to make an image. I did it in Windows, but it reboots and does the edit outside of windows. It rebooted, started the edit and never completed. I sat and watched it sit for 45 minutes and then concluded it hung. I attempted two edits which you set up and then run as a batch. The first one shrunk the bootable partition by 350MB, and the second step was to grow the system partition by 350. Step one appeared to work, but then it hung. When I rebooted after staring at the screen... well you know the story...

paul

Yep, that would do it.

I saw your other thread about having reinstalled Windows and trying to copy your old system back, so let's continue from there. :)

Thanks to all those who lent a helping hand getting my computer fixed. Unfortunately it was to no avail. I tried many different things over several days. I wanted to avoid rebuilding all the software, printer drivers, network shares, etc, etc.

In the end that is what I did. I am happy to say I got it up and running. The setup is the same, but different. I wound up stealing the 60 GB SSD from my old computer so the new setup is:

150 GB SSD OCZ Vertex 2. Boot Drive ( this is the drive I hosed, not OCZ failure )
600 GB 10K Raptor, My Docs and additional Program files.
2 1TB Data drives. One for music and movies, and the other for photography
60 GB Crucial SSD for scratch;
2TB Seagate External which holds live mirrors of the Data drives and images of the Boot drive and the My Docs drive.

I have 16 GB of ram, two optical drives, radeon 6900 series card, and two large monitors and am running a i7-2600 @ 3.4.

Yes I built a lot of computer.... And to be totally honest, I was so irritated with all the trouble I was having, I was just about ready to go buy a $1200 iMac and say goodbye to MS operating systems.

Now that it is back running, I must admit I do like my computer again...

Thanks again.

Paul