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Rebuild boot manager after missing boot partition

Posted: 26 Nov 2016, 18:10
by pelox
Hi everybody,

I have been experiencing some issues with my laptop 300GB HDD and decided to replace it after the frequency of bad sectors showing up was starting to compromise its performance.
Basically the HDD structure is as follows:
- A hidden 10GB recovery partition which contains the boot manager.
- A Primary 100GB partition with WIndows 7
- A logical 190GB partition with all the Data

I have tried to simply clone the disk using a variety of applications, but none of them can read the damaged Recovery partition. The other two are copied without problems.

The issue comes when I try to boot the new disk without the recovery partition. My computer is not able to locate the right boot sector in the HDD, but I can still boot it using Hiren's Boot and launch using "Boot from Hard Drive". The partitions are perfectly healthy.
I've tried to refresh the new disk structure using TestDisk, and make the W7 partition bootable (*) and the Data partition Logical (L). I write the new partition table and reboot, but nothing happens. If I boot without HIren's CD (or any other bootable disk) I just get the infamous blinking cursor, so my PC does not locate the boot sector correctly.

What should I do now in order to update the new disk structure and make it bootable?

Thank you!

Re: Rebuild boot manager after missing boot partition

Posted: 29 Nov 2016, 07:12
by cgrenier
Run "bootrec.exe /fixmbr" from the Recovery Console.