Windows 7 Boot Problem

[iandelap]

Hi, when starting up my computer I get the follwing problem.

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

I've searched the internet and this problem is everywhere however my problem is slightly different.

I have been using Windows 7 for a while without problems. A friend gave me his laptop to work on and it had hard drive problems. I inserted his laptop hardrive into an external IDE to USB enclosure and went to reinstall Windows XP on it. All went fine until the installation went into a BSOD. I unplugged his harddrive and went to start my computer up and got the above error.

I tried using Windows7 Repair but it cannot detect my Windows 7 Installation at all. I inserted the Windows XP disc and it recognises my Hard drive as a Dynamic Volume and the unallocated space of 8MB is now also a Dynamic Volume.

I hope I dont have to reinstall Windows on my computer, is there any other things I can try

Thanks

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello iandelap, welcome to Seven Forums!





Windows will only boot from a primary partition/volume, have a look at Option Three in the tutorial at the link below to change the partition to a primary so it can boot.
Be sure to post back with an update so we know how it sorts out.


Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

 

[iandelap]

Hi, Thanks for your reply Bare Foot Kid

I came up with another solution that i thought I would try.
I went to Install Windows 7 again without formatting first. When I got the option to select where to install, I restarted my PC. It now boots up as normal.

I figured that getting to this point may activate the only hard drive in my PC to allow installation of any operating system.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello again.




Could this be what you did? Anyway I'm glad you got it sorted and thanks for the update.


Startup Repair

 

[iandelap]

No I couldn't even get that far. When you try the repair option it then tries to identify which installation you want to repair. My installation of Windows 7 didn't even appear then.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

At least is starting now right?

 

[iandelap]

Thats the main thing