Can't boot to windows. Lost bootmgr.

[Fomorii]

I have an SSD and an HDD. When I bought the PC it originally came with one 2TB HDD and the previous owner didn't erase his boot partition. I had an SSD in my laptop at the time which I removed, sold the laptop and installed the SSD into the PC. I formatted and installed win7. All is fine. Except that it loads the BIOS two times, in the first attempt it says no Hard Disk Found then loads into another bios and loads windows which is set up to dual boot to the two windows boot partitions. I never bothered to get rid of it because he said he wanted the personal files but it's been almost a year now and every time i've offered to sort it out he's cancelled.

Which brings us to today. I've had enough and I want to try out ubuntu again, I used to use it on the aforementioned laptop and thought i'd get back into Linux, learn some programming inside linux because i'd be less likely to distract myself with games.

I go to install 13.04 but because that 2TB drive has all my personal media on it I didn't want to re-partition the whole drive to set up the ubuntu boot partition which is what it was asking me to do. I went to the advanced partition panel to reformat the HDD windows boot (sda1 ~160GB) to ext4. However apparently i needed to set up 3 partitions to use ubuntu /boot, /home and /? (can't remember the name now could someone correct me, also is that whole statement wrong? Is there any easier way of doing this?).

Because I couldn't partition the HDD without formatting the whole drive I opted out and tried to boot into windows.

I can't I keep getting BOOTMGR not found or something to that effect.

I've created a bootable windows 7 usb to try start-up repair to automatically create the bootloader but the operating system is not listed. I tried load drivers and it allows me to navigate through the SSD so it must be able to mount it if i'm able to navigate?

Does anyone know where the location of the drivers are?

Or another method for reconstructing the bootloader?

Can anyone help me to install ubuntu and then put windows 7 into the GRUB menu? So I could boot that way?

[The_1ted]

Do I understand  you correctly: You want to install Windows 7 on the HDD?

 

Have you tried downloading a new windows 7 image and buring it to a DVD? Maybe the one you used is broken. I had that problem with a xUbuntu Image?

 

To your BIOS problem: I don't know what Motherboard you're using, but it its one of the new Generations try a BIOS update.

Also try to unplug all unneccessary drives, cards and stuff.

 

Addressing Linux try xUbuntu it works on my stone-age Laptop quiet well and it looks pretty similar to normal Ubuntu. It also just uses one partion.

 

 

For further help it would be great if you could post some pictures of the whole startup process.

 

 

 

Greets from Germany! 

[Fomorii]

Want to install Ubuntu on the HDD sorry if that wasn't clear. I got it working now had to delete sda1 and replace it with root /boot and swap. Got it working now, however as soon a minute or so after booting up and logging on it crashes and I can't move the mouse and keyboard shortcuts that i've tried don't work. I've tried two different mice and they both work for the first few minutes. I'm thinking it might be a display driver or something.

It's running on:

i7 920 2.66ghz d0

6GB Corsair dominator

Asus P6TD deluxe

Kingston SSD/2TB WD

GTX 580 1.5GB

[HEXiT]

go into bios and turn off hpet mode. ubuntu doesnt like it but it is essential for windows 7. also check your event logs if you pc stays on long enough

[zoltan]

Did I understand it right, did you reformat the Windows boot partition to ext4?

 

In that case, windows is not on your system anymore, and windows can't use ext4 or any other modern high performance filesystem.

 

You'll have to use a liveCD linux distro of your choice to reformat it to NTFS and flag as boot, then reinstall windows on that partition.

 

I hope you didn't destroy your data.

[Fomorii]

My Windows partition is on the ssd. I removed the Windows partition on the hdd. I've not lost any files. Now ubuntu crashes on start up. Could be the driver for the gtx 580? Its fine until I try to access a file directory, usb, ntfs or ext4 all cause the pc to crash. As does attempting to connect to the wifi or even opening the wifi connectivity inferface.

[Fomorii]

I also can't find hpet in the bios, doed anyone know where it's located?

[Fomorii]

Pretty much all sorted now. Still can't access windows. But I can write a little guide for what I did to get this far.

Basically when installing ubuntu create 3 partitions and a swap. I had a 160GB partition that I re-partitioned to ext4 and swap. Set swap to be the same size in GB as your RAM. Create ext4 partitions for:

/boot - ~500MB 

/ (root) - 10-20GB (This is where you install applications I went for that because I was only using 160GB)

/home - use the rest of your space this is where personal docs will be kept.

 

Then because I have a GTX580 in my system the whole system would crash like a minute after start up or until I opened something with a GUI, even rudimentary file storage windows. This was because of the standard nouveau drivers. To fix this I used the linked commands through terminal.

 

I still however couldn't even access windows 7 but I could add it to the grub menu. 

 

At least I have ubuntu up and working but i'm still getting the BOOTMGR is missing.

When I use a win 7 disc for start-up repair it can't even identify that windows is installed.

I've used the command prompt with select disk and select partition commands to no luck. 

 

Anyone else got any ideas on repairing the windows bootloader?

[godlikegohan]

well this is for xp but worth a read

http://kb.acronis.com/content/1507

and a little better page

 

http://www.tweakhound.com/2012/11/13/how-to-fix-the-windows-bootloader/

[Fomorii]

That second link looks promising will update (hopefully with much gratitude and success) tomorrow. Got an exam in the morning and i'm supposed to be revising. Really don't want to get caught in a troubleshooting vortex.

[Helepolis]

Here's why you likely cannot boot windows as I have experienced this in the past myself, Vista, windows 7 and 8 like to install essential parts of the operating system across other drives and partitions during installation. So if you've removed a drive containing the partition or just erased that partition that holding those files windows will not boot and I have yet to see a fix to repair the installation. Good news is that your data is safe. To avoid this in the future, unplug all others drives during windows installation and try and keep it on it's own drive and plug everything back in after you finish your installation. By doing this Windows will not place essential booting files across other drives in your PC, just works best in general. Hope this helped!

[Fomorii]

I've got windows back and everything is working now!

To fix the BOOTMGR is missing boot to a windows disc, select recovery, open command prompt and type these commands:

bootsect /nt60 c: /force /mbr

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

 

I also had to  change GRUB 2 to always display. Run terminal then sudo gedit etc/default/grub and change the following

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=x - remove value

GRUB_TIMEOUT=x change to -1 (will never timeout or to preferred value in seconds)

 

Then back to terminal and sudo update-grub

 

Make sure you boot to the drive with Ubuntu first and everything should work.