Toshiba Laptop will not boot into Win 7

This is actually the first time I can remember that a user reported a known-good partition was shown Unallocated by PW CD. I also have not seen the issues which have been reported as of late.

PW CD has been used in hundreds of successful, often complicated partitioning and rescue operations here without fail. The only time I have seen PW fail is when OP used the home edition when we advise using the Boot Disk.

When Disk Mgmt gives a questionable output, we confirm the real one with PW CD. It has never been wrong that I have seen reported until this thread.

I cannot think of a more vital and important tool for Win7 installers than PW CD. You can shuffle partitions like a deck of cards and it comes out flawless and disk checked.

I think you have forgotten the same thing happened on my system.

Fortunately - with some difficulty , I have now managed to find information from that time which may be relevant.

Have contacted MT with the details already

@partition wizard
Let me know if you received the email

Si I never heard what exactly this prob was. Can you fill us in?

Partition Wizard Anomaly

Short memory? - LOL I thought I was bad.

I don't imagine that will make any difference. The program will behave in a similar fashion - I ran it from pe if you recall - still the same odd result.

It doesn't have anything to do with the resize function - it was just reading the extended partition info incorrrectly.

Same as in this case.

Must be hard to track down - the developer seems to really care - which is a good sign.

He is watching this thread now , apparently.

I would immediately suspect the PE disk, but I'm not the expert on those that you are. Is it conceivable it could skew PW readout?

That is odd - he is not watching now.

No - I ran it in windows first - saw the strange result.

Then I ran it in pe to see if there was any difference - same issue.

Laforgeotte used the Linux boot disc - same issue again.

There is definitely a bug there.

Hope you guys find a resolution.

lafargeotte said:

Hope you guys find a resolution.

Can you please tell us what backup software you use, and what type of backup job produced the "regular backup" from which you restored to the new drive?

Can you be precise about the actual "restore" job you ran? Details on the "backup" job that produced the "regular backup" dataset from which you restored would also be helpful.

The new drive definitely came out from that restore incorrectly... (a) no "system reserved" primary partition marked "active", and (b) Win7 C-partition created as "logical" instead of "primary" as it was on the original drive. This is not how your original drive looked (presumably, since we don't have a screenshot of DISKMGMT for the old drive), so you didn't use Win7's "system image" for your restore tool.


Also, it would be helpful if you tell us exactly what series of steps you did with Paragon to resolve the issue completely.

Since there's no "system reserved" partition on this new drive, presumably you are simply booting directly to the now-primary C-partition and Win7 in there, where some particular Paragon repair operation has rebuilt the MBR on the drive to point to... instead of the "system reserved" partition where the boot manager files are normally located.


Fortunately, you were able to change the new "logical" C partition to primary using Paragon (though theoretically, the same operation should have been possible with Partition Wizard, and we've now got the PW author watching this thread and trying to participate so as to fix the bug that caused it to see the new drive as "unallocated").

And then you probably double-checked that this now primary partition was still marked as "active" (if not, you changed it to "active").

And you probably had to "rebuild MBR", or something.

It would be very helpful to others if you could recount the steps you took with Paragon that accomplished your repair.


Again, theoretically this same repair should have been possible with Partition Wizard standalone CD (which I assume was free Home Edition v5.2, unless you paid $29 for the new v6.0 Professional version).

There appears to be a bug in PW, which caused your new drive to appear "unallocated"... but the drive as shown in the screenshot is actually unbootable to begin with, because of what got done by your restore program/procedure.

So all details you can provide here will (a) help others to avoid the problems you ran into, and (b) help the Partition Wizard author better understand the situation and perhaps be able to recreate what your drive looked like so that he can chase down the bug in his product.


Many thanks for additional info.

And of course, you did get your problem solved... which is the good news.