I'm still at it.... I got the os to show in the list of the windows 7 repair by changing the active partition to #2 on Drive 0 (There are 2 physical drives configured in a RAID 0, the first physical drive seems to have 3 partitions, 2 small ones, and a big one.) Wierdly, it shows the windows 7 install being on the e: drive though, not the c:
So, next...
I burned the Win7 64bit pro .iso from digital river (
http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/) and attempted a repair from the Win 7 installation disk. The repair fails with the same boot sector problem I've encountered before.
I went to the command prompt from the repair GUI after the failure and ran:
chkdsk / r c: which appears to run fine
&
bootrec /fixboot (as well as the other switches) which don't seem to fix anything.
After doing that, I try to boot normally and the system blue screens immediately after the windows logo starts with the error:
unmountable_boot_volume (only able to see that by using the "don't reboot on error" option at F8)
As I mentioned, at the repair menu, it does find a windows 7 installation, but it's on drive e: and not c: ? I'm perplexed by that...
Perhaps I'll try to boot into "mini Windows XP" from Hiren's bootCD and run the disk manager to have a look at what it can see?
Otherwise, any other ideas, I feel close - but for all I know the RAID is just totally hosed. I've fiddled with the active partitions and I've fiddled with fixing mbr's on the partitions, so I could be all messed up now. Drive 0 seems to have 3 partitions, 2 small ones, and then a large one. I'm not sure which one should be the active and which one needs the mbr for windows 7.
I really hope the disk can be repaired and that I can boot into windows 7 and all will be hunky dory, soon :??
Ty much!
Rebuilding a RAID isn't for the faint hearted. It doesn't matter that it's Windows on the drive, but it's almost all command-line (there's little to no GUI for this stuff, this is hard-core server admin tools we're talking about).
There are paid, commercial utilities for Windows in the form of other bootable CDs that have slightly easier to use, somewhat point and click (but still lots of numbers and info involved), but I have no experience with those. I'm afraid I can't hold your hand through this, you're going to need to make heavy use of Google. I'm just letting you know that your data *can* be retrieved, I've done so several times with the aforementioned Linux utilities if you're willing to brave it.