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Can I make this drive bootable again?

Posted: 10 Apr 2015, 13:05
by disker
I had a Windows OS drive that was accidentally formatted by my Mac.

Fortunately, testdisk was able to recover the NTFS partition and everything looks intact. I've made a backup of the files.

My question is is there any way to make this disk bootable into the Windows install again? All the Windows files appear intact. I've set the partition to primary again and tried rebuilding the MBR but it hasn't worked. I tried a Windows recovery disk and it could not find any valid install of Windows and Bootrec has also failed to fix it.

Am I stuck reinstalling Windows?

Re: Can I make this drive bootable again?

Posted: 10 Apr 2015, 23:49
by cgrenier
Set the partition as *(bootable), not P(rimary).

Re: Can I make this drive bootable again?

Posted: 11 Apr 2015, 03:46
by disker
Thanks, I tried that previously and just ended up in a boot loop.

I ended up running testdisk again, setting it to bootable and writing again without result. I then was able to get the Windows recovery disk to find it this time though. After running chkdsk it's now booting again! :D :D