Windows 7 Boot Problem - After failed Fedora 16 installation

Hey guys, ok so I'm quite new to this forum thing and not sure where this one needed to be posted but hope its in the right place. I'll try and keep this short. I have a very up to date HP laptop with Windows 7 on it and wanted to do a multiboot with Linux using Fedora 16. Booted from the disc that came with Linux User magazine and went through the various steps to install but something went wrong and it has now completely knocked my boot up.

I am not sure how it has managed to do it but after booting into the recovery console and using the command prompt to launch DISKPART I have discovered that Disk #0 is listed as Invalid under the Status column. When I select the disc and list the partitions there are 4 that show up with 3 being the Boot partition, however when using the Detail command for Partition 3 it states "There is no volume associated with this partition."

I am in a trap here as I have no idea how to return it to working order so that I can at least access my files and get them off the hard drive before I re-install everything and obviously have no way of getting into Windows at all. As I'm not a complete idiot I have tried the usual CHKDSK and also tried the usual command - bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot of which the first one worked fine and got rid of the Linux Grub Boot Loader, however the second one didn't work as there is no volume available to boot from.

Does anyone know how I could solve this one? I have to say that I have never had any issues before with installing Linux on any machine whether it be desktop or laptop.

Any help will be very much appreciated and any experts out there that may be able to help by all means fire away with as much of the usual jargon as possible as I will understand any terms used.

Many Thanks

Dave.

 

LINUX caused you problems?!

Well, the simplest fix would be to do a format reload. You can try installing Fedora first; I only have experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu, so I can't say for sure where it all went wrong. It sounds like you've gone through the most obvious troubleshooting tips right off the top of my head though.

To access your data at least, you can try using Mini Windows XP or a Linux Live CD.

"No volume to boot from" tells me the MBR was damaged during the process.

 

you could always put the drive in another machine in order to salvage/retrieve your files from the windows partition too. then nuke that mudda you-know-wudda.

 

Easiest thing to do would be to save your data to another disk, then format the laptops HDD. Start from scratch. Never had any issues w/ either GRUB of the FreeBSD loader doing a dual boot - Windows XP/7 and CentOS/ FreeBSD.


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