First post... Issues with MBR

[RAMWolff]

Hiya,

My first post here. I don't hang out in Windows help forums but when you need them I'm glad they are there!!

OK, here's my story. I received my upgrade copy of Windows 7 the other day and couldn't wait to get to the weekend to get it installed and say "bye bye crapy Vista". All was going well on Sunday. Backed up my files and then proceeded to install Windows 7 (rather than upgrade, it's cleaner that way, plus my old Windows and settings are stored in Windows.old folder so no biggie).

OK, next morning I get up and proceed to get my programs installed. I'm going along, getting things installed and key codes entered and tweaking settings as I go along. I come to my Utilities folder with all those exe's and zips within and install a bunch of those (including Winzip, WinRAR and what not) then I come upon Acronis .... partitioning and boot software... OK cool, just in case I need that sure why not?? It was version 10.... little did I realize it was going to affect my boot sector. So at one point I needed to reboot... so I did....

Got past the BIOS and all that and up pops the Acronis software... WTF?? I look and do not see Windows 7 as a bootable OS! Months and months ago I messed around with Ubuntu Linux and had to install Grub to boot into it. What a frigging mess that made of things. I ended up loosing it all. Had to reinstall Windows Vista (luckily the Windows.old folder was there so I was able to recover most of my files and settings). So I THOUGHT that old boot sector had been wiped out. Guess not.

So there I am stuck in this Acronis UI looking at what? TWO instances of Linux to boot into, in which I KNOW neither exists because I wiped out those partitions months ago and yet Acronis found the OLD boot sector and did not find Windows 7, being that it was a version too old to do that!

Through many moments of frustration (to put it lightly) I got back into Windows, went on line and immediately went to the Acronis web site and bought tech help ($10.00 down the drain). I sat there for 1/2 hour waiting for someone to help me and then he told me that since I used the wrong version of Acronis that it was out of his hands. My answer back was "Oh, so I'm out $10.00, NICE! I waited for a response and eventually gave up. I won't ever buy from them again and I'm thoroughly fed up with them and their "support". My fault I know but you know, you pay for support you expect them to at least give you options. Oh he did give me an option... you can buy the newest version which will fix your issue....

So anyway, I also created a "Repair Disk" and booted back out and in and repaired the issue. Kind of...

Now I'm getting this message when I boot in.....

"Non system disk, press any key to continue" I hit the Enter key and then I boot into Windows.

How can I fix that??

Also I had a question about using the "Repair Disk". If you had to use the Command Prompt and you want to fix the MBR you would type in what exactly??

fixmbr
fix mbr
or .....?

Thanks and sorry for the long story but hope that gives folks enough info. I can build a computer from scratch but I know little about boot sectors, command line commands or anything like that!! :shock:

Thanks

Richard

 

[sup3rsprt]

If you had to use the Command Prompt and you want to fix the MBR you would type in what exactly??

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

 

[RAMWolff]

Hey, thanks for the link!! Very helpful. I'll be sure to print that out when I get home tonight!!

Best,
Richard ~

 

[RAMWolff]

OK, tried that and I'm met with the following message when trying the FixMbr and FixBoot options:

... is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

So not sure what to do at this point. Bootrec.exe just seems to offer up the commands but nothing more. I thought it would act as a gateway to allow the commands to be used but to no avail.

Please help me resolve this if anyone can... quite frustrated.

Thanks so much!

Richard

 

[chuckr]

1. Go here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/257-windows-7-tutorial-index.html

2. Click on the "M" letter, at top.

3. On the new page, about the fifth entry down, there's something like:
"... Restore MBR ..."

4. See if that helps...

5. Bookmark the link shown in Step #1, for your future references...

 

[RAMWolff]

I'll give it a try. Thanks much!!

Richard ~

 

[RAMWolff]

OK, did at the tutorial suggested. Booted with the Windows 7 DVD rather than the Recovery Disk I had created. Got the X:\Sources> option and began working my way down the drive letters (writing down each one that was valid and showed files after entering the DIR command)

I NEVER found a drive that was my DVD drive. I have my DVD and DVD Writer drives set as R and W (Read and Write), it's just the way my brain works. None of these drives in the Command Prompt showed the drives contents so there was no way for me to move on to step 6 on.....

Not sure what to do now.... This is getting quite annoying. Seems that commands that should work, don't or things that are there are not being found when typing in the commands properly!!

 

[Jacee]

There is another command (to try) in this article How to repair MBR on Windows 7 | eHow.com

 

[RAMWolff]

A bud of mine on another forum gave me the correct command to get the MBR fixed...

at the prompt type
bootrec /fixmbr
press enter

Now not sure what was happening with my DVD drives not being found when using the source command in the Command Prompt but at least that's fixed now.

It would be nice to get the old Linux GRUB boot manager out of the other drive though. Not sure how to look for that. Seems to be hidden. Sneaky!! :sarc: