MBR is missing

[way2slow]

Hello all!
I am Harry and this is my first post.
I (obviously) have a problem:
My wife received a new pc at her job, with I5 3770 CPU, 8 g mem, 2 500 GB HDDs on RAID 0.
The preinstalled windows was 7 Ultimate x64.
She tried to break the HDD (without knowing that it was raid 0) in two partitions using partition wizard professional 8.1. She broke the disk into one 300 gb and one 650 gb chunks.
It all went well, without any messages.
When she tried to restart the PC however, the message "MBR is missing" appears.
She tried everything, from bootrec.exe /fixmbr (but not fixboot) to the tools of hiren boot cd 9.9 without any luck.
Do you have any advice to resolve the problem without formating the drive(s)? The M/B is the Asus P8H77-V LE.

Thanks in advance for any answers!

 

[way2slow]

Forgot to mention:

We tried to repair the installation with the Windows DVD, always with the message "This version of System recovery is not compatible with your version error".

In the BIOS i can see 2 disks and the raid program of the M/B shows the two disks and the sum of them to a new disk, wth the correct size, and normal an bootable.

 

[Golden]

The boot manager (in fact everything installed on the RAID0) was split across both drives, but when it was re-partitioned, the installation was effectively destroyed/removed/formatted. You will need to reinstall Windows from scratch.

 

[gregrocker]

You should be able to partition RAID, although we see nothing but problems with it so I wouldn't advise how to go about it. But if any tool should be able to do it it should be PW.

Can you browse in to see your data with the PW boot disk?

If so you can rescue it with Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console
or Paragon Rescue Kit Free Edition 11.0 Free CD

Then I'd try the normal repairs by confirming that Win7 or it's 100mb System Reserved partition is Partition Marked Active then run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times. This is sometimes necessary when resizing is done on the boot sector.

You may need an installer with SP1 to overcome the error when booting to repair. It is provided here in the steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 which I would follow as a last resort to get and keep a perfect reinstall, even for retail.

 

[way2slow]

Thank you for your replies!!!

The files are intact. We managed to copy them to another disk without problem. However, the (raided) disk cannot be partitioned I think. We tried all night, to no avail with Easeus Partition Master 8.1, as is was very urgent to have the pc up and running today…

The 100 mb partition is active.
We are installing with SP1 disk, so the problem is not there either.
So we decided to delete the raid (as it offers few advantages and many disadvantages IMHO) and to clean install with 2 disks.

Thank you again!

PS. I do not know if it should be marked solved...moderators please advise.

 

[gregrocker]

Our threads are not normally closed as others find, learn and contribute to them for years to come.

Following the same steps compiled in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 will assure a perfect install. These are the tools and methods which work best based on tens of thousands of installs we've helped with here.

Unplug the second HD during install if possible, then afterwards plug it in, wipe with Diskpart Clean Command before partitioning in Disk Mgmt for storage.