Boot Issues

[superman859]

Yesterday I tried to get rid of my old XP partition from a dual boot machine but might have just messed things up a bit. Windows 7 wouldn't let me delete the XP partition since it was marked as active / system / etc. So I booted up with a linux distro and deleted the partition and extended my Win7 partition to take up the extra space while I was there.

So, XP is now gone. Problem is I cannot boot. Running prompt win7 disk shows that C is my data partition and D is my windows partition (not sure how this happened, since C used to be the win7 partition). Tried startup repair, it says no partition table found and tries to fix it. Doesn't do anything no matter how many times I try.

I ran command prompt and found that bootrec /fixboot says Element not found.

bcdedit says the same thing.

Trying bootrec /RebuildBcd finds D:/Windows like it should, but selecting to add it yields 'Element Not Found'.

Looking at the partitions under the 'Install' section on dvd shows both partitions are marked as logical. There is no system or active partition.

Is there any way I can restore this without reinstalling windows 7? I do have the data partition separate which is good, but I still have a bunch of programs and such installed and it will take forever to restore all of those.

All of the guides on restoring the boot record seem to fail, and I think it might have to do with the partitions both being labeled as logical and I have no system partition or active partition.

 

[usasma]

I suspect that the key is in recreating the partition that you've deleted. Once that's done, you "may" be able to use Startup Repair to fix it.

If you're not able to recreate it, then I'd suspect that wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows is your only other recourse.