Restoring the Windows Boot Partition…..

I have a Dual Boot boot system Running Ubuntu 12.04(LTS) and Windows & Home Premium(x64).

The other day i was booted into ubuntu and had to use gparted to partition and format a flash drive to use with my Pogoplug-B01. And i by-mistake formatted the windows boot partition . Oops. I restarted my system and could not  boot into windows! For me Windows is like a necessary Evil . Its where all my games reside! All for the other programming related stuff i use ubuntu. So i needed to get the windows partition up and running.

Also before you go ahead i would recommend you take a backup just in case anything goes wrong by booting into the system by a ubuntu live CD.

This can only be used to repair a system where the boot partition is either formatted or is corrupted. This would not work if the main system partition containing the OS itself is damaged.

Starting Windows Vista Microsoft made the boot partition a separate partition (generally 100MB)from the partition containing the actual OS files.

Step 1 Get the appropriate WIN 7 recovery Image from here.

Step 2 Create the CD/DVD or the USB stick(Skip to Method 2 in this Link )

Step 3 Without the boot sector When you turn on your computer u will get a ‘no Operating system Found’ error . So you will need to set your boot drive to the DVD or the USB drive Depending upon whta media you are using.

Step 4 Once you Boot into the Repair Disk Hit Startup Repair. If that fixes the issue. you are all set! But for me that was not so Easy. I Selected the Command Prompt Option the type in the following commands and hit enter after each command

diskpart

list disk

select disk (followed by the number of the OS disk; most likely 0)

list partition

select partition (followed by the number of the Boot partition; most likely the 100-200Mb partition)

active

exit

Step 5 Now again type

diskpart

list disk

select disk(followed by the number of the OS disk; most likely 0)

list partition

make Sure there’s a star(*) against the selected boot partition

then type format and hit enter. This will format the boot partition to NTFS.

Step 6 Now to repair the boot partition make the boot partition active by repeating the STEP 4

next enter following commands and hit enter after each command.

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /rebuildbcd

Step 7 Now restart the computer with the recovery media plugged in.

now in the recovery options select the ‘Startup Repair’ option. It should b able to fix any other issue with the boot sector and restore it to the optimal state.

Now Restart the computer and this time remember to unplug the media when the system shuts down.

Have Fun.

Let me know how i goes in the comments below! 🙂

Best of Luck!

These Posts Were really helpful:

[1] http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winre/createfromiso/#.Uhm2oG3tx24

[2] http://www.selectrealsecurity.com/fix-windows-startup

[3] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/What-are-system-partitions-and-boot-partitions

[4] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/create-a-system-repair-disc

select partition (followed by the number of the OS partition; most likely the largest partition)

5 responses to “Restoring the Windows Boot Partition…..

  1. You’re a star!

    It wasn’t quite as straightforward for me as it was for you. I had to retry a few times to get the partition to be reliably active (I think it stuck only after I had formatted it) and kept getting “BOOTMGR missing” errors despite fixing the mbr but ultimately by redoing it a few times with slightly different steps it all came together in the end and I can boot into Windows. Next up is getting Ubuntu bootable again so I guess I’ll have to see if restoring the grub bootsector that I had saved prior to the ordeal will do the trick or if more is involved.

    In any case, thanks ever so much for writing it all down here.

  2. You have created an EaseUS Partition Master WinPE bootable disk now. You can manage your hard disks and partitions through the bootable drive whenever the computer fails to boot normally.

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