Bootmgr is missing...

whs said:

Greg, this is a Dell. The bootmgr is on the recovery partition.

That's why I wrote:

gregrocker said:

I would move the Active flag back to Recovery and see if it starts. If not run the 3 Startup Repairs with reboots until it starts.

Wolfgang I had a post on this thead earlier yesterday which appears to be removed. Did you see it?

Yes, that's exactly what I said: Try Active on Recovery first which may start since Recovery should already have the boot files.

If that fails run 3 Startup Repairs to repair or rewrite the Boot files to Recovery.

If that fails move Active flag to C to run 3 Repairs to write the boot files there and make the partition bootable.

Hi.

Happily I am writing this post from W7 :)

Partition Wizard did help because with all that playing of mine I had all 3 partitions set on Active.
I set only Recovery partition as You suggested but it didn't help.
Than I tried setting each partition as Active and restarting but this didn't do any good as well, so I came back to Active on Recovery partition.

The solution to my problem was kind'a strange, I think. Well, maybe the problem was strange.
Anyway, I have found "BOOTMGR - multi-BOOT ManaGeR" on Ultimate Boot CD and I used it to edit MBR.
When I moved Recovery partition to the first place on the list, I could finally say "It's alive, ALIVE!"

I have no idea why, but while creating this unallocated space on my drive (via W7 Disk Management), it had moved this DellUtility Partition to the first position and this was messing things up. Even though only the Recovery partition was set as Active...

Anyway, thanks for Your help Next time I'll remember to use virtual partition for my Linux adventures

Well - I was trying this before and it didn't help, so it was just hooked-up in my mind as "used/didn't work". But I guess it was when I had more than one partitions set as active, so now it would probably do the trick.

I also had pepared UBCD together with Partition Manager (on separate pendrives) when I had access to other W7 PC (I am not that good with linux yet and feel more comfortable in windows). So as long as it was ready I decided to give it a try :)

You sound disappointed that I didn't try it. Why?

EDIT: I've just read Your edit

Disconnecting drives would take much more time (removing keyboard, finding all the screws and latches, etc.) so I am happy I didn't have to do it.
And the Rebuild MBR in PM didn't work - tried it after setting only Recovery partition as active.

Now about my question and ignoring guidance. I had no idae what to do more when I asked here and Your and whs' helped a lot. I have moved forward. I thought forums like this are about finding solutions and not only following all instructions blindly, aren't they?

What many visitors here don't know is that many of these fixes for Win7 were mostly developed here during beta and have worked for tens of thousands of users or more.

So when we give them it is with this in mind. But we understand that you may not know this. So it can be frustrating when steps are ignored.

We also write for countless others who will find these threads in searches for their own problem. So I was mainly correcting the record for them.

Enjoy Win7 and come back to visit us here at its home.

It's highly appriciated what You do here - for sure by me. I created this thread because nothing I googled had worked for me (including things from this forum).

Maybe because of this thread, someone with problem like mine will spend a little bit less time to restore the system and will not have to open the laptop (which is not a nice action - at least for me).

So, thank You again and I'll surely stop by in the future