Hello mate and thanks for the input.
You can use an elevated command window to mark active and inactive, disk management can only be used to mark active.
If mistakes are made, no system changes are registered until a reboot.
Once I accidently marked another partition active and when I realized the goof I used diskpart to correct and there was no issue at restart.
Thanks again my friend for the answers, your help and tutorial taught me things I needed to know so I can correctly handle my OS's and hard drives, and Im sure this will lead me to solve my booting issues (thats on another thread
Peace,
Alex
Bare Foot Kid -
OMG, I want to lace this response with about a thousand smiley faces and thank you's with a gazillion exclamation points for this thread. I might not even use these forums again (unless I get another serious problem but this is the first I've had) but I felt compelled to create a user name at 1:30AM just to say thanks. Yesterday I had reformatted a second hard drive that had XP on it that I no longer needed, and only had the hard drive with WIN7 on it left installed. After doing so I got the boot error that this thread covered. Going in and activating the partition allowed me to fix the BOOTMGR error which was the error I got next. I would have never gotten that far if it wasn't for this thread! Most importantly, I didn't lose any of my data or settings and everything is back to normal. Sorry for the story, I'm explaining this story rather than jumping around in circles in pure happiness.
DD
Hello DrunkenDonuts, welcome to Seven Forums! I love that AKA!
I'm pleased you found a solution and thanks for the kind words; if ever you need help in future, we'll be around!
I've used a similar method for years, then due to a nasty rootkit infection a senior member linked me to this tutorial, and I completed it exactly as written, and,...well technically it didnt work, but that was because of the infecton (it reinfects MBR at boot before reading it). But my point is, mine was a special case, I'm sure it would have worked. The similar method, I actually learned by MS tech staff online, is to do the startup repair which initially occurs in the system recovery panel after choosing the OS from a listbox of detected OS's, then when it (usually) replys with a "startup repair cannot fix this error" , close the "send or dont send window by the [x] corner, press the button (with a title which eludes me currently) but it is the one that brings up the recovery options. Then run startup repair (2nd time) much quicker, often a different responce is given, and then repeat the close window press (unknown named)button and click startup repair, it will be fast again, answer text varies, then close the send/dont window and click [reboot] button.
Just an observation to ponder or whatnot. I have quite a few sucesses under my belt as ive been in he computer repair/assistance business for many years.
It's posted on some of their forums/answers areas of technet too, but i don't have a link to show you.
thanks for your time,
mike
What worked for me was setting the partition active using DISKPART per Bare Foot Kid's instructions. Kudos!
I had a dual boot system with XP as the active partition, with the boot manager and all that, then 7 as a second partition, also a system partition. I blew away the XP partition with Acronis Disk Director, resized the 7 partition to occupy the disk fully. I then did Startup Repair 3-4 times as instructed elsewhere (apparently it has to keep doing repairs over and over). Eventually it went nowhere since the partition was not active. So finally, I did the Command Prompt, DISKPART, set the partition with 7 as Active, and blammo, I was good to go.
So, don't forget about the Active flag!
I just wanted to post a solution that fixed my startup problem that was not listed above.
Problem:
I had a dual boot system (2 physical drives) and I wanted to remove one of the OS selection from the startup screen. I did this through msconfig, but I didn't know it would delete the 100MB partition windows makes during install. After that I could not boot from the second hard drive. None of the startup repair options worked until I figured out that the 100MB partition was not present.
Solution:
I installed the drive on a working computer so I could get to the disk management tool. There I manually created the 100MB partition and set it as active. I then ran the auto repair and everything worked.
Finally determined the problem was an overheating processor. The Dell Studio 1557 was good for 4 years but started overheating and shutting down.
The repair procedure actually allowed me to reinstall the os but i decided to ::) nstall a newer os nstead.
The only way to keep the laptop running was a bag of ice cubes underneath.
This works for about 6 hours .. b4 i need to replace the ice cubes.
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