OS partition is inaccessible and Windows won't boot

gregrocker · 10 Mar 2013

So you turned off the controller which RAIDs the 32gb cache drive (actually a chip on the HD or mobo) so you could install Ubuntu onto it? This is tricky even when we try to do it with Win7 so all bets are off if you also imposed GRUB on it. GRUB does not always play well with Win7.

Your Disk Mgmt shows the large OS partition is marked Active but does not have the Boot flag which in Partition Wizard means the System Boot files are not booting correctly. System is the flag in Disk Mgmt, Boot means the same thing in PW.

So to fix this make sure the Win7 HD is set first to boot in BIOS setup, boot into Win7 DVD to run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times, report back what it finds.

Check also in BIOS setup what any EFI settings are, including Legacy BIOS and Compatibility Support Module.

You'll need to read the Manual for your specific mobo or PC to see how to work the cache drive back in, which may require turning back on the Controller to RAID it again then running Recovery. But every PC/mobo is different with this feature. What we've helped do here is unRAID it by turning off the controller to install Win7 on it when users insist this is what they want, in spite of how pitifully small an SSD it is.

znut · 10 Mar 2013

Thank you for your help. That diagnosis sounds right, although breaking the RAID and installing Ubuntu was accidental. I'll report back. I can worry about reCaching the drive later.

znut · 10 Mar 2013

The first two pictures are my current bios settings. The boot order ect has probably changed.

The remaining three pictures are disk/partition status after running the recovery 3 times. It does not recognize that the main partition, let alone the partition is bootable, and it says it's raw.

znut · 10 Mar 2013

This is probably why it recognizes the c drive but won't do anything with it. I looked at it's properties and tried to disk check it, but had no luck.

As for the startup repair, I'm not really sure what it was trying to do. It ran very briefly and seemed to fix it, however when it reboots the system has a boot error.

It says it used chkdsk to repair it, however I've already tried using chkdsk and it would spit back out that the partition was of an unknown volume and state.

One more thing, I tried to convert the "raw" partition to ntfs, but cmd responded saying that the partition was already ntfs.

gregrocker · 10 Mar 2013

Your HD has no UEFI boot partition even though the BIOS is set to UEFI mode. This means that it can't boot or repair. Did you change the BIOS setting to UEFI from Legacy BIOS mode?

Is the HD booting in MBR mode which means it was installed without UEFI in Legacy Mode? You can check this now by seeing what it allows for conversion (without doing so) when you rightclick on the area in the red box below:

If it says Convert to GPT Disk you have an MBR HD which means it could not have been installed in UEFI mode. You can Disable UEFI mode and enable Legacy BIOS or Compatibility Support Module (CSM) to see if it will repair using the steps I gave you earlier which are to repair a Win7 install in Legacy BIOS mode on an MBR disk.

If you're completely blind about UEFI and need to understand it better before proceeding, watch this video first:

znut · 10 Mar 2013

I don't think my bios gives me these options. I changed a few things but they didn't seem to work. At this point, I'm just going to have my school's tech support recover what ever dates they can then just wipe the drive and reinstall windows. This is getting too involved for me. Is this a plausible solution?

gregrocker · 10 Mar 2013

Probably the best course since trying to install an OS on the 32gb SSD cache is extremely complex even when it isn't done accidentally.

You can try to rescuiing your data now to an external USB using Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console or Paragon Rescue Kit Free Edition 11.0 Free CD.

If this succeeds you can also try running Lenovo One-Key Factory Recovery from boot which is Chapter 3 in the Manual here. In fact I'd read the entire manual: http://download.lenovo.com/consumer/...12_english.pdf

znut · 10 Mar 2013

Alright. Thank you very much for your help. It is greatly appreciated.

gregrocker · 10 Mar 2013

No prob. Keep us posted on how it goes. We see at least one of these SSD cache issues per week since they came out.

benjy206 · 11 Mar 2013

I don't know if the problem is solved or not. But I had the same problem with a linux install. As when i installed it as a dual boot it wouldn't let me dual boot just striaght into the linux OS. What i had to do was use hirens and mini windows xp to access it and delete two partitions as it creates partitions that is not regonised by MS so when i went in through this i could see the hidden partitions and everything was good again.