New HDD, C greyed out and not accessible in ATI 2011
My desktop was knocked over and the master HDD came loose, bounced around and died, luckily only it was damaged. Replaced the HDD, Bios recognized it and reinstalled (W7, not image) to it . All fine but on reboot, no windows unless install disk inserted due to missing MBR or something. Next, restored image and MBR with ATI, restored fine but still wouldn't reboot. Used repair on W7 disk and now ATI shows C as System Reserved of 100 MB and greyed out and my new HDD as D which will restore but not reboot unless with the W7 install disk or even an XP install disk inserted. Also, Windows will no longer install with prompt to press any key, skips that and starts automatically only getting halfway through an install and looping over. Tried a UBCD disk, Windows starts fine then with the disk, W7 even finished installing and ran fine except XP was on UBCD. Not even sure this is an ATI issue any longer, thanks.
Thankyou but only one partition of three backed up so no letters there. On a brighter note, UBCD completing the install of W7 (don't ask me how, XP was on UBCD CD) has made my drive restorable and bootable from the W7 install disk and now I am receiving the press any key prompt again. W7 has been restored from the image now but is only bootable with UBCD or install disk so I am back, at least, where I began.
Does the drive still show up correctly in the BIOS?
Is the drive set as the booting drive?
Are there any "MBR protection" or "virus protection" options enabled in the BIOS that might be blocking writing the the MBR?
The Windows DVD will only ask you to press a key if it detects an installed version. It apparently wasn't finding one.
Can you post a screenshot of what Disk Management shows for the drive?
The drive shows up correctly in the BIOS as the Master drive, no protection in the BIOS I know of. No idea what 3rd entry is, ignore pointer, forgot to move it.
Do you get an error message when you attempt to boot the drive? If no message, exactly what happens?
What are the BCD file settings? Start an Administrator Command Prompt and run bcdedit at the prompt. Take a screenshot of the window and attach it to a post.
There is no error message. With the install disk, I get the prompt to press any key, ignore it and boot into Windows normally, without it, it loads to a black screen showing boot from CD/DVD and stops there even if the install disk is inserted. I don't understand why a fresh install doesn't fix all this, thankyou for the help.
I've now noticed in the Bios above the settings for boot priopity is Hard Drive prority and upon entering, it shows my D drive above C. + or - are used to move either but do nothing. I'm a bit over my head here but that doesn't look right. Edit: changing boot order to HDD first won't let me boot at all, install disk or not.
Most current BIOS settings have a "main" boot menu that just lists devices and then separate menus for other devices (like hard drives). Make sure the "hard drive" menu has the new drive set first. Then make sure the "main" boot menu has the DVD drive first and then the "hard drive" (it may show the drive name or it may be generic).
In the BCD output, what is the line just above the first one displayed? It should be the "device" setting for the boot manager. Is it set to partition=C: ?
Sorry, I didn't see the line above in BCD; yes, it shows partition = C. The "main" boot menu shows the new hDD as first but also shows the DVD drive as fourth and doesn't change, Floppy, LS 120 and HDD are ahead of it. Pressing enter to accept it as first only boots the computer.
Does the BIOS have a "Boot Menu" you can access from outside the BIOS settings? For example, ASUS boards let you press F8 to bring up the Boot Menu. From there you can select which drive to boot directly, bypassing the default BIOS boot menu settings. If your computer supports this, does it boot when you select the drive directly?
Have you tried repairing the MBR? Boot to the Windows 7 DVD, either go through the repair steps to get to the Command Prompt or just press Shift-F10, make sure that C: is assigned to the Windows partition, and then run: bootrec /fixmbr
Still looking but I see no way of bypassing the bios boot menu. Also, I'm a bit leery of using the W7 DVD for any kind of repair, it's repair rendered the computer unbootable before and ATI useless; at least, it is usable this way. Thanks for your time but I think it's time to have this computer looked at or even try a different HDD, don't know why that would help but who knows, thanks again but this is getting a tad complicated.