Drive does not have a system/active partition - can't set it

ccallana

Member
After a bizzare power outage in our area (a turkey flew into a substation!) my Win7 Ultimate 64 system wouldnt' come up. Boot manager was giving me errors...

I couldn't find my win7 install disk, so I booted an XP install disk and tried to fix things (I think this may have messed things up for me....) things still not working

So I finally got a hold of a Win7 disk, booted into the RE, ran Startup repair several times with no luck (now I've gone back and done it again and read the details - its finding that the Partition Table does not have a valid System Partition, each time I run it, and saying the Repair action is Partition Table Repair, but every time I come back it does the same thing over and over)

I've followed the manual steps listed here http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD and some of them work, but eventually the steps always end up failing. Usually with an 'element not found' error.

I tried going into Diskpart to set an Active partition, and it looks like it works, but as soon as I exit diskpart, its not active.

How can I get my disk back to a system/active partition and make it stick?
 
Do you have multiple HDDs ?
If so, disconnect all of the others, leaving only the W7 HDD while you do the "repair your computer" "startup repair" sequence three times.
 
That was exactly it!!

Pull the 2 secondary drives, ran the repair, works great!

What a pain... but at least I don't have to reinstall!

Thank you!
 
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