Solved Windows 7 Won't Boot After Dual Boot Partion (XP) Delete

[mattyb151]

Right, let me start by saying that I've been tearing my hair out over this problem for a few days. I've read a tutorial for doing this the proper way on this site but that was after I had already gone and deleted the XP partition.

Basically, I upgraded my friends CPU and motherboard and used Paragon Adaptive Restore to keep the install of Windows 7 intact so he wouldn't need to start from scratch. This was successful but he had a partition for XP which he asked me to get rid of.

I had no idea that just deleting the partition with Paragon partition manager free would leave it saying "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" because I didn't know about XP having to be in the primary partition and Windows 7 in an extended partition.

Anyway, I reckon as well as me messing up, partition manager must have messed up as it left free space at random parts of the hard drive and in between partitions. 2 mb of free space behind the windows 7 volume meant 2 and a half hours to move all of the data back.

What I've done to try rectify the problem:

• I've rebuilt the MBR.
• I've cleaned the hard drive up, getting rid of the free space and now it shows up in Gparted (I wish I had a screenshot) as an extended partition with a logical volume containing Windows 7.
• After reading a bit about partition types and deciding I needed to make this extended partition primary (which I still don't know is possible), I ran Minitool's Partition Wizard and set it to primary.
• I tried to run startup repair 3 times after making the partition "active" but after the second time it says that there's nothing wrong with the startup and that it can't detect any problems.

Now, I'm at the stage where it starts booting the hard drive and an underscore cursor blinks at the top left of the screen forever.

Ideally I'd like to just get windows 7 to boot so I'd like to know if there's some way of imaging the windows 7 volume and restoring it onto a newly created primary, boot, active partition then deleting the extended partition.

Out of any other forum, this one seemed to have the most clued up people in this matter so that's why I'm begging you for help.

Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[alphanumeric]

See if this helps, http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

 

[mattyb151]

See if this helps, http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

Thanks for the idea but I've tried it quite a lot already.

 

[gregrocker]

Since you've got Partition Wizard, boot the disk and take a picture of the full drive map showing all listings columns and scrolling, attach back using paper clip icon in reply box.

Otherwise you should be able to mark the Win7 partition Active using PW or Win7 disk, then boot into Win7 disk to run http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html. This link shows why it is necessary sometimes to run three full repairs with reboots no matter what it reports because it will not complete all needed repairs otherwise.

If this fails, then using Partition Wizard, shrink C from the left by 200mb, create a New Primary partition marked Active, then run the 3 repairs again to see if constructing the System Reserved partition will overcome corruption blocking making C bootable.

As a last resort, unzip these boot files to a stick then copy into C or System Reserved using http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93347-copy-paste-windows-recovery-console.html, then run the Repairs again. This assures the files get written to the partition since they never were but only updated on the XP partition.

 

[mattyb151]

Since you've got Partition Wizard, boot the disk and take a picture of the full drive map showing all listings columns and scrolling, attach back using paper clip icon in reply box.

Otherwise you should be able to mark the Win7 partition Active using PW or Win7 disk, then boot into Win7 disk to run http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html. This link shows why it is necessary sometimes to run three full repairs with reboots no matter what it reports because it will not complete all needed repairs otherwise.

If this fails, then using Partition Wizard, shrink C from the left by 200mb, create a New Primary partition marked Active, then run the 3 repairs again to see if constructing the System Reserved partition will overcome corruption blocking making C bootable.

As a last resort, unzip these boot files to a stick then copy into C or System Reserved using http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93347-copy-paste-windows-recovery-console.html, then run the Repairs again. This assures the files get written to the partition since they never were but only updated on the XP partition.

Just letting you know, got it to work. After making the partition primary and running startup repair 3 times it still said everything was fine but didn't boot at all SO I rebuilt the BCD and now it runs perfectly. Thanks for all your help.