please don't laugh...

mypcbroke said:

Again, question: Will I be asked to "hit any key to load CD/DVD" after each repair/restart? because I feel like I'm going in circles. If it's repairing, I'll keep doing it, but I was assuming the pc would take action on its own (which it doesn't at the beginning)

You want to see if HD will start up before booting back into DVD to run another repair.

The Recovered flag means it should start IF it is marked Active. I highly recommend you use Partition Wizard bootable CD to look at the Disk Management picture which will confirm Active flag, allow you to browse for files and reveal unexpected issues:

Example: Is WIn7 installed on a Logical partition which cannot be marked Active to recover the System MBR into it? Instead it must be recovered into a primary SysReserved partition. In that case look for the 100mb SysReserved partition to mark Active. The PW picture can tell us this.

kodi said:

mypcbroke said:

Also, this time after hitting "Repair My Computer" it had (recovered) listed instead of "Windows 7" like before... am I on the right track?

Did it have windows seven and Windows seven recovered listed and you had to make a choice?
If it did chose recovered and see if it loads.

It only has:
(recovered) 10138 MB (C:) Local Disk

Aside from the happy face that I didn't mean in the prev post, I have the boot order as 1. IDE0 and 2. CD/DVD.

Am I correct in assuming that the HD will try to load, then it will go to CD/DVD if it doesn't? Or will I always get a press any key for CD/DVD if I have the windows DVD in there?

I don't know if I'm doing everything wrong. But I tried all steps up to getting the Partition Wizard. I burned it to a CD, but I keep getting "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key"
and I have selected CD/DVD from my boot menu...

Did you click on the ISO to use built-in Windows Image Burner to burn PW ISO file to CD? You can't just copy it to DVD. It needs an Image BUrner.

Use ImgBurn at 4x speed to know it is burned bootable. http://www.imgburn.com/

Where did you get Win7 DVD? Did you burn it yourself? Was this a factory install?

Greg,
Sonic RecordNow! picked the option for me and it is saved as:
pwhe52
ISO Image file

Doc,
It is the Windows 7 upgrade DVD they sent from Acer. My pc originally had Vista but I bought it after a certain date so I received a free (?) update

I don't know if Sonic burns ISO disks. It is not being seen as a bootable disk anyway.

Best to use the built-in Win7 image burner or ImgBurn.

It would be good to see a picture of your HD using PW CD to know what is there. But if Win7 is on a primary partition and is marked System Active and won't repair after 3 attempts, there isn't much else we can do - Except look to see if you have a Recovery partition to run in case Win7 won't install. That way you can upgrade to 7 from Vista if it becomes necessary. Or do you have the Vista recov disks?

If you're ready to try reinstall we can do that, too. Or wait until tomorrow?