I went to confirm that the Repair console was still on F8 tools after deleting the dual boot and it wasn't. It's linked WinRE file was on the deleted OS.

I want F8 Repair console on this laptop so i deleted SysReserved, created Primary Active partition there, then ran Startup Repair x3 which failed to rebuild SysActive with "Cannot repair Win7."

Next I converted the SysReserved 7 backup image to .tib using Acronis so I could do a partition-specfic reimage of 100mb. This failed - both with and without restoring Disk signature - after trying to repair both x3.

Since I now had both partiitons' Win7 image converted to Acronis, I used Acronis boot disk to try to reimage the entire HD, which failed because it wouldn't merge the two converted .tib images correctly back together, and wouldn't work reimaging them separately. This annoys me when a paid program can't handle its own fancy features.

In the end, I fell back to original Win7 Backup image to reimage the entire HD perfectly in 20 minutes. This is about the tenth time Acronis operations have failed, whereas Win7 backup imaging has never failed me.