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251949
March 5th, 2011 19:00
Boot Partition Lost, Cannot Boot to Windows 7
I was recently installing a new OS (Linux) on my netbook (Dell Mini Inspiron 1012), and by mistake I did installed it into the Dell recovery partition that's at the same time has the boot files for Windows 7. So, after doing so I was not able to boot to my Windows 7 anymore.
I tried first a Windows 7 recovery CD (from a bootable USB as my netbook doesn't have a CD-Rom), and it said there was no Windows 7 installation files found.
And then I went to the CDs that came with the netbook from dell thinking I can just make a fresh install using them, copied it's content from another computer to a USB stick, then made it bootable. But it stops each time on the stage of loading installation files.
I just don't understand how we have rescue CDs with our netbooks that doesn't have CD-Roms! but even copying those CDs content to a USB didn't work!
Now I have the Windows 7 partition with all the system files, but just missing the boot files. I tried to search for them online, if i found them I'd be able to put them in the same partition of Windows 7 and let the recovery (or grub boot-loader) detect them.
Please help me whether to get back the deleted partition, or to find the boot folders, or if I can download the recovery partition's content from Dell support. I just want my Windows 7 back.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance
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Tom Green
322 Posts
1
March 5th, 2011 20:00
Hello congilia
If you can boot the win7 recovery usb and get to a command prompt,
run diskpart and make win7 partition active then exit diskpart.
change to that drive %sysroot%\windows\system32
then run BCDBOOT.EXE C:\Windows
that should install boot files onto windows 7 partition.
Hope this helps
Tom
congilia
2 Posts
0
March 6th, 2011 09:00
That worked like a charm :) thanks alot Tom
oscaraa
1 Message
0
April 6th, 2015 07:00
I know this is old, but in shows up in googles search and some one in the future may see this a couple of years from now like I did.
So, basically, this did work... but I had to tweak it just a bit. See, I have many drives connected, so my system drive according to BIOS is not, it's actually .
I followed your guide, but when I tried to run BCDBOOT.EXE per your instructions, it just wouldn't work. So, instead I did: based on your BIOS. So, what happened was it kept attempting to run on my non-system and it kept giving errors. When I pointed it to the exact drive (btw, to find out which drive letter is assigned to what, run diskpart, then cmdline:
bcdboot e:\windows /s e:(p.s. - windows is not case-sensitive, so it works no matter what case you use); this specifies the exact, target drive letter instead of assuminglist volume), it finally worked.p.s. - I spent nearly 2 days messing with various command/cmdline programs, partition recovery/editing, etc.; nothing seemed to work, till I tried this out. This whole issue started because I dual-booted XP/7 from the same disk (XP was the first partition, 7 was the second one). So one day I foolishly (in 7's diskmgmt.msc) made 7 the active partition (instead of XP). The problem was that booting was done from XP's partition, not 7. So, the next day, I had to reboot and to my dismay, Windows 7 just wouldn't load anymore, it gave me this error: BOOTMGR IS MISSING (etc.) That's how this whole mess started. But, now, through trial and error, I got it up and running, but only Windows 7 (which was what I wanted anyway [and luckily I had already made complete backups on external drives prior to screwing everything up]).