repairing windows 7

[ridgefieldpc]

I messed up my Windows 7 install like this:

I have a Raid 1(Mirror) and a another spare HD on the RAID controller.
The raid 1 contained my windows 7 and the other spare HD contained a broken windows XP 64 bit.
Yesterday I installed XP 32 bit on the spare HD. Everything went well, but now Windows 7 doesn't boot anymore on the RAID. I switched the HD boot order accordingly so that's not it.

What I suspect happened - when I installed windows 7 originally it made the boot manager partition or w/e you call it on the spare HD. Since that was reformatted when I installed XP that partition no longer exists.

I tried the repair method using the windows 7 DVD, but no OSes are listed to repair.

I'm positive the files are still on the raid, I can see them from XP. Now I don't want to reinstall windows 7 all over again if I can help it, plus this would make a great little learning experience.

I think I need to make another partition on the RAID for the boot manager, but I have no idea how to do this...

 

[ridgefieldpc]

Answering my own post, I have read this article:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2264&page=8

I managed to reduce the problem to a "BOOTMGR is missing" however repair doesn't fix it and neither does "bootrec /fixboot"

If anyone knows what I am talking about, there is no C:/bootmgr directory in my drive...

Not sure if there is supposed to be one, as bcdedit tells of that path but it doesn't exist.

 

[ridgefieldpc]

Fixed. Had to copy bootmgr (file) and possibly bootmgr.efi from the Win7 DVD.

If anyone wishes I can post a complete guide how I fixed it..

 

[stevenamills]

Fixed. Had to copy bootmgr (file) and possibly bootmgr.efi from the Win7 DVD.

If anyone wishes I can post a complete guide how I fixed it..

Very interested. I'm using RAID 1 more and more and repairs are inevitable.

THanks....

 

[silvano]

Having a guide would be nice if I were to run into this issue in the future! Maybe even putting it in a publicly available subforum so that others searching for answers to a similar problem can find it.

 

[wtigger]

The moral of this story is, if you are using multiple OS's in the same machine but on different HDD's, DISCONNECT the HDD you are NOT installing the OS on, when you install an OS on one of them. I went thru something similar with a system without RAID but with 2 HDD's, XP on one, Win7 on the other. All SATA. I disabled the HDD I wasn't using in the BIOS until I finished installing on the other one. I learned this the hard way.

 

[hyfidel]

Ditto that! Or at least use a test machine for playing with new OSes. I installed Puppy Linux on a USB stick from my regular computer and accidently deleted partition information on my second drive when I formatted the USB stick. Oops! Luckily it was a 10 minute fix...

 

[MobileTechie]

So if I'm reading this right you are saying that the Win 7 install made the spare HDD the system partition whilst the RAID drive was the boot partition? (I'm using the confusing Microsoft definitions) and so when you altered the spare HDD you removed the boot manager files?

I've noticed Windows doing this on an XP install on an ASUS netbook which has two SSD drives. It made one the boot and one the system.

 

[ridgefieldpc]

That's right Mobile Techie - it made the boot partition onto the spare because it was either:

-the bootable drive at the time in BIOS
-on a lower SATA port than the RAID.

Don't you love Microsoft's logic?

I will be working on a guide today to fix this particular issue where should I post it exactly for maximum coverage?

 

[Petetech888]

Post a complete guide.

Fixed. Had to copy bootmgr (file) and possibly bootmgr.efi from the Win7 DVD.

If anyone wishes I can post a complete guide how I fixed it..

Found it, thank you.