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SSD boot record borked -will boot to windows normally with CD in drive
Hello, I'm Henry.
I'm fairly new to Windows 7 though I have lots of experience with Windows XP.
I forced myself to upgrade before the April 8th deadline though I knew I would loathe the experience.
This build is about three weeks old. I put in a Sandisk X110 64GB SSD and I have a WD 500GB drive.
I also had my XP build on a 2000GB WD drive. When Win7 installed it setup a dual boot with the old XP installation.
In typical MS fashion it gave me no options of where to store the boot information.
I installed Win7 to the SSD and am using the HDD as a location for everything not system related.
A week and a half ago I removed the dual boot setup as it was no longer needed, but had to go through the setup to fix the boot record etc. Seemed to have worked fine except the installation now shows the installation as "Windows 7 (recovered)". It WAS working without issue. None at all. Then this morning for some unknown reason the system decided that my router was an "unknown network". I have two routers, one is connected to the cable modem downstairs the other is set to pass through. All of this was working normally until it stopped this morning.
(Cannot use wireless due to interference in old building w/ steel beams, aluminum electrical wire and foil air duct).
I reset everything including the computer. That's when the real problem began: the system now hangs at the "verifying DMI pool" and shows a series of dots as it is doing so.
It stops before noting success and hangs. It does this unless I put in a bootable CD or use the F12 key to select the boot device.
I fixed the (extremely annoying!) networking issue with the reset but the boot problem remains.
I went through the Windows 7 repair option. Let it do it's thing. Tried the "bootrec /fixmbr" which reported success, but "bootrec /scanos" says there are "0" OS found.
Likewise "bootrec /rebuildbcd" also completes with "0" OS repaired. Neither fixmbr nor rebuildbcd options fixed the problem though they both reported no errors and instead success.
The GUI option to fix whatever is making windows not boot also reported "0" OS were fixed though my installation shows up in the box except for the aforementioned
"(recovered)" part appended onto it.
The only way to boot is through the aforementioned F12 or bootable CD.
The BIOS on this mainboard doesn't have an explicit option to set the SATA ports to AHCI. Setting SATA ports to Advanced seems to be the option (per several online threads
about the G41M-ES2L) to make it work right and that is what I set it to prior to installing windows 7.
No changes to these settings have been made thought since I installed windows. I checked that they are unchanged.
So after all of the above how do I make it go back to working? I looked in Disk Manager under Windows 7 and YES the SSD is Active and shows as the "Boot, Active, Crash Dump, Primary".
The HDD shows as "System, Active, Primary". I'm not sure why it made the HDD active when I formatted it since I don't remember doing that part.
But I suspect if it wasn't I think I might not be booting at all.
Through all of this the computer works just fine once I get into windows. I'm using the system to type this and there are no issues whatsoever.
So the only way I can boot normally is with either the CD in the drive or by using F12 and selected the HDD.
It's obviously a borked MBR, but how do I make it fix it if bootrec is not showing the installation? Is there a way to force it to detect the installation?
One other thing of note: we had a power brownout during a hard thunderstorm two days ago. The computer restarted and checked the drives for consistency.
All tests passed without issue. I even ran the test a second time manually to be sure. No errors found. I also let it do the check before startup and again no errors found.
What am I missing? I seem to have done everything I know to check and/or do. What else should I do?
Henry