You can cancel automatic repair when it first starts, then click "Advanced Repair Options" to get to the command prompt. Then use fixmbr to rewrite the MBR and fixboot to fix any boot-related issues. This is useful when deleting, for example, a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, which replaces the default loader with GRUB. Anyways, he's tried that already. He also said he changed the settings in the first place to flash an Xbox 360 drive ROM.
Thanks for filling me in as I tend to skip over Xbox references. Had to be some reason to abandon ACHI since it is becoming the new standard for Win7 installs.
FYI: All former bootrec and bootsect commands are automated in Win7 Startup Repair. But not sure it makes it any easier since it needs to be run up to 3 separate times to repair/rewrite the MBR.
haha for the record, I was facilitating in the modding of my friend's xbox and he was doing all of the research. I was just letting him use my computer. Look at what a bit of good will can do to yourself. But it's my fault for foolishly changing those bios settings.
and I also just resetted my bios settings to optimized defaults and nothing changed, except for all of my settings which were wiped out lol.
Another problem is that I can't build ubcd4 b/c the laptop i'm working off right now is a mac (dun-dun-dun) and I can't run the .exe that I use to build the disk. The linux iso that was also suggested in the links doesn't work for my ATI video card (it said that during bootup and then asked me to hit enter, then it promptly restarted itself.) So i'm going to do this ubcd thing on a friend's computer tomorrow and see what happens.
When you're ready, free Partiton Wizard bootable CD is the most useful rescue tool we use around here for hundreds of Win7 related partition removals/recovery. I can't remember a case where it has failed yet, even though resizing can be expected to sometimes fail.
Alright, I know this is stupid, but did you make sure to set your Hard Drive back as a Master device when you plugged it back in?
dang you know a forum's well supported when you can't keep up with the replies :) Yeah i'll be sure to use that partition editor once I give up on everything else.
Also, I did indeed set my hard drive as my first boot device after my shenanigan with the xbox. That's what you mean by setting it to master, right?
No. I mean make sure that the little plastic thing on the back the drive is in the master configuration. The label on the top of the hard drive will show you how to set it. Also, if the cable is labeled MASTER and SLAVE, make sure your main drive is on the MASTER end and any other drives are on SLAVE.
remember that my drives are sata, not IDE. No IDE settings to fiddle around with on a SATA drive :/ There are jumper configuration pins on my model but that's for spread spectrum stuff.
Woops, totally lost track there. So this is a Windows issue, not a BIOS issue? That doesn't make sense. You didn't touch Windows...It has to be something BIOS-related, even if you reset the settings. Look harder before reinstalling.
arright so I decided I would write back just for the record instead of leaving this thread in limbo.
So I tried basically everything that was suggested in this forum. Along the way, I discovered that you cannot use the ultimate boot disk on windows 7, because I tried it on a friend's 32 bit win7 and it couldn't find the setup files it needs to create the disc.
However, I also found that you can edit the registry through WindowsRE itself. You just open the recovery console (or whatever it's called) and type in regedit. It's so simple!
However, my problem was not the ahci registry key, as it was already set to 0 (enable). With no clue as to why the hard disk was not booting, I decided to install windows 7 on top of the old installation and work from there. But for some reason I could not do that- I would try to install windows 7 using the normal setup wizard, but it would say something like "the partition could not be used" or something stupid like that when I try to select my main partition.
So by that time I was pretty convinced that my installation was toast- i could not find the cause of my old windows installation not booting, and I could not even install a new copy of it on the hard drive. So I proceeded to back up all of my important stuff using Knoppix and restarted my computer to do a reformat and start from zero.
This is where I was really lucky. After I restarted my computer, I forgot to boot off the CD-ROM, so then my computer attempted to boot from the HDD. For some reason, it decided to work differently that time and it told me that the boot files were corrupt and whatnot. So I booted on to WinRE again, and ran the automatic diagnostics procedure. Surprise! Everything fixed itself and now my computer boots up perfectly again.
I'm going to list some possible reasons as to why my computer started to behave itself again. The thing is that I didn't attempt to boot off HDD for a long time, so I can't pinpoint exactly what fixed it. Anyways, here goes:
- I ran chkdsk using the cmd in WinRE, and it actually found a couple of corrupt files. Dunno why it didn't boot up even after that tho.
- Just as I restarted my computer to start the reformat, I went into my bios and reset everything once again, and changed the settings again. Again, not sure why this would help cause the settings that I changed were the exact same as I had before (all sata controllers on AHCI, memory manually set to 1600 mhz etc etc)
- When I booted into Knoppix, I deleted a couple of HD movies from the drive (the HDD was about 95% full previously). No clue if that did anything though.
Whaddya guys think?
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