Totally unable to fix boot issue.

G

Grapher

Member
After uninstalling Acronis 2012 at the end of which I had to do a Restart, the machine would not boot into the Windows 7 O.S. at all. The error message said "No bootable partition in table"

I regret to say that my PC is now well and truly screwed up. I tried the Windows Installation disc Rescue Environment repair tools to no effect.
I disconnected all but one hdd leaving just one (a different one) SATA NTFS installed, formatted it and tried to install Windows 7. Same result "No bootable partition in table"

I have tried deleting the partition and recreating a new one. That does not work.

Finally, I downloaded easyBCD and that failed to fix the problem. I even went through what EasyBCD calls the "Nuclear holocaust" procedure and that failed. I made sure that at every DOS command execution I got a "successful" confirmation.

I am now totally stumped for a solution and in 20 years of Windows O.S.'s I have never been so devoid of ideas of how I can fix this problem. Surely, if I installed a new hdd, made the single partition Active and loaded a fresh O.S. it should boot. The installation should write a new set of boot manager files should it not?

H-E-L-P !!!!!
 
" ..tried to install W7..." ?
At what point did you get "no bootable partition" during the install ?
 
In the usual manner, when the Acronis Uninstaller told me that the uninstall was complete and that I must reboot my PC. I did just that going for Start\Restart and as the BIOS completed and "Starting operating system" came up the very next line then added "No bootable partition in table". I have deleted the partition on the new hdd, made it active and providing that I opt for CDROM as first boot device, I can by using the Partition Wizard boot-CD get the local drive to boot! Crazy. The opening screen from Partition Wizard gives you the option of booting from the CD or from the local hard drive. So if I can get the local drive (C:\) to boot by taking that option from an app running on the DVD/CDROM drive, why oh why can I not get it to boot straight from the C: drive?

I managed to make a clean Windows installation by using the Partition Wizard CD to boot from my hard drive but what a clunky business that is and the machine will still not boot from the C: drive on its own.

I have plodded once more through the entire DOS environment "Nuclear halocaust" EasyBCD technique but despite all the "success" confirmations at each command execution, the confounded PC still refuses to find a boot sequence.
 
Set the BIOS to boot CD before HDD
Set the C partition "active"
Boot the Installation DVD/repair CD, select "repair your computer" then "startup repair"
Do the above line 3 times.
If the OS on the C disk is OK as you seem to be saying, then it should boot unaided at this point without any need for manual fixes.
 
Fixed

Thank you so much for your help. However, I have fixed it. I am still totally puzzled by why, but the culprit was a USB flash drive plugged in at rear of PC and I removed it clutching at straws. The machine booted normally then!!! That is despite me selecting hdd as first boot with CD as second. For some strange reason the BIOS was itself determing to try to first boot from the flash USB stick and overiding my selection of hdd then CDROM.

Thread can be closed now.
 
Is your machine a Dell, by any chance? I've seen this behavior with the DELL BIOS a few times.
 
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