reinstalled operating system now no boot disk

I had a crash of the operating system on my wifes laptop. I reinsatlled windows 7 from a dell system but had an issue of not finding the boot disk. I then saw I had a recovery partition on the hard drive so I activated that. I still get the no book disk problem any suggestions?

 

What exactly do you mean by "activated the recovery partition"?
Also does the HDD show in BIOS or not?

 

The hard drive has 3 partitions one is a recovery that can be activated by pressing alt f10. Yes the bios shows the hard drive as well as when the windows install is running it shows the 3 partitions.

 

OK, so you start the e-recovery process, I assume it finishes fine, reboots and what, the problem persists? Or doesn't the e-recovery finish at all?

 

Thats whats crazy the recovery completes but still does not see the hard drive it has to restart a few times during the process when it does if I dont hit the alt f10 it will not boot it says no boot disk. Can I access the boot file?

 

Can you launch anything that would allow you to see disk SMART status (like Ubuntu from a thumb-dirive?)
Chances are that the HDD is failing, SMART status with all the details would be useful.

Something looking like this:

 

I can get windows 7 up and loaded I just cant shut it down. I wonder could i have caused a conflict because it looking for the hard drive from my dell? What program would i need for windows to get your info?

 

The one in the screen-shot is called HD Tune and it has a free version.

 

I will give it a try. If the hard drive is failing why can I then see the partitions on the hard drive?

 

ok so I brought the laptop home and put in a windows 7 install disk. When it booted my kids asked a question and I missed the press a button to load instead it booted up and completed the recovery partition repair. Now here is where its strange if I take the cd out it will not boot. If I boot from the disk and try a startup repair it detects no issue. If I dont press anything it boots up with the cd in the drive. I am going to down load the file and see what it says on the hard drive.

 

fix the mbr;

INTELLIGENT COMPUTING: How to Fix/repair/Rebuild MBR in Windows 7/8

 

I found a similar article and tried it in 7 and in 8 with no luck it look like it may be a bad hard drive.

 

What system do you have?

 

The computer is originally windows 7 but i had upgraded to 8 when it came out. When i was trying to repair it as my windows 8 was an upgrade I had to restore 7 which is when i tried to repair the boot system when that didnt work but the hard drive was back to seven I tried to update it again to 8 and still could not get it to boot.

 

What make and model number? It is much easier to diagnose once we know exactly what you have. Also what is the listed hdd?

 

Its a gateway 52nv 500 gb toshiba hard drive AMD A-Series quad-core processor A10-4600M (4 MB L2 cache, 2.30GHz with Turbo CORE Technology up to 3.20GHz, DDR3 1600 MHz, 35 W)
4 gb ram

 

It appears you do not have UEFI, a good thing here. I would ask in bios is there an option to protect the disk as in usually a boot sector protection?

 

No i have not seen that option in the bios.

 

It is possible the HDD has an issue where the sector for the MBR has died, although it is rare just for that area to go. When the MBR refuses to write it is more likely a BIOS av option preventing the write. Even selecting defaults in the bios may not disable this feature. It is possible, however slight that is, using another oem disk is causing the issue too.

 

Can I format the old partition and then restore from the recovery partition.

 

The problem is getting the MBR set, I am not sure windows can do it while the OS C: drive is mounted This is why you need a boot CD with the windows utilities or a Linux one.