Problem Booting into Win 7

I was running a dual boot of Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and I just used Partition Wizard to delete my Vista partition and expand 7 to take its place. However, when it finished, it couldn't find an OS to boot into. I put in my Windows 7 CD, wen to "repair", and tried to boot repair option, and it said that it found a problem, attempted to fix it, and prompted me to restart. However, when I do so, it just boots right back into the CD, and if I take it out, it refuses to boot at all. I looked at the repair log and the last entry is something like "no active partition", after which it says "partition set to active". However, it doesn't seem to have worked.

I've been through the loop 3 times now. Does anyone have any advice on how to break out, short of installing a new copy of Windows?

 

This has worked for me:

1. Boot from Win 7 DVD.
2. Select Repair.
3. After boot repair, get into command line mode [I forget exactly how to do this-sorry].
4. Try different drive letters to see the drive letter assigned to your Windows 7 partition,and the drive letter assigned to the DVD.This is needed for step #6 below.
5. Log on to DVD [probably drive c:]. CD to c:\boot [or whatever DVCD drive letter is].
6. Type in "bootsect /?" to get options.
7. The option you need will be something like: c:\boot\bootsect.exe nt60 e: [e: stands for letter assigned to Windows partition-see step #4 above].
8. Remove DVD and reboot.
9. Optional step: after successful boot into Windows 7 [boot progress might look like Vista instead of Win 7 flower], install EasyBCD, and use that to install Win 7 boot loader to get flower back.

 

text deleted; mistakenly double posted.....

 

Hmm, that didn't do the trick. I tried to delete the BCD registry and create a new one; it let me delete but "could not find the path specified" when I tried to make a new one.

I now have the HDD hooked up externally to a different computer. Is there a way to manually create (or copy) a bootloader/ BCD registry / anything else it needs to boot?

 

Since bootsect.exe did not work, I suspect the drive or motherboard port/cable. I think you should now run chkdsk on this drive while it is attached to a different computer.

 

So, you have vista on the first partition, 7 on a second. When you loaded 7, it added the boot information to the vista boot record. When you wiped the first partition, you took the boot information with it.

You're going to need to use the bootrec tool from the Windows Recovery Environment.


You may need to run the fixmbr, fixboot and then rebuildbcd (in that order)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

 

I second this approach.

It sounds like Vista was your boot and system partition. You just have to now establish your windows 7 partition as your boot and system partition.