Active/inactive partition. Laptop won't boot

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emy_girl72

Jul 1, 2018
5
0
20
Hello there!
So I have the next problem:
My laptop had just one partition, so I used Disk Management to make another one. I have now disk C and E.
I put some files from C to E. The next time I started Windows, it showed: missing bootmsg file, press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
I search on the internet, and I found out that I may have been set the wrong partition active.
I created a bootable win 7 portable drive and I tried to set active only one (the good) partition. I failed it.
Now, the problem is I set Disk 1, which has only one partition, as inactive and now my laptop won't boot the portable drive with win7 iso file on it.
I really need some help now. I don't know how can I proceed in cmd to set the 2 partitions back to active.
Thank you all 4 your time!
Ps. The error I get now is this: Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause
 
Solution
E
So I've created a bootable cd. It seemed like the usb drive was broken
I entered cmd, selected disk 0, partition 1 (100 mb) srp, made it active and now my laptop works.
Thank you a lot, RealBeast! ❤
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RealBeast

RealBeast

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Sep 13, 2010
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Unlikely that you only had one partition, there is usually a small (100MB) system reserved partition for the boot record.

And where did you find the space to make a second partition?

Can you post a picture of your current disk management window?
 
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E

emy_girl72

Jul 1, 2018
5
0
20
Thank you for your answer!
I had partition C and I divided it into C and D. So my windows is on C.
But I think I clicked on D ,,Set disk as active'' and I broke something since windows won't boot.
So I didn't touch the system reserved partition.
 
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RealBeast

RealBeast

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You cannot run Windows 7 from an external drive.

The partition that needs to be the active partition is the 100MB system reserved partition, and that will point to C where the OS resides. And once the SRP is active if you have trouble, just run the startup repair tool that is higher on the list where you find the command prompt choice.

You cannot use just an ISO image unless you can mount it with image mounting software, which is unlikely in its current state. You need to create an installation DVD or USB stick to boot from so that you can run a startup repair and then use the command prompt tool to enter diskpart commands to set the SRP as the active partition.

To make a bootable USB installer stick there are numerous options, but the simplest is the MICROSOFT TOOL. Read the installation instructions and get the tool by clicking on the download tool where it says 1. Click to open the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool page.

Using diskpart to set the active partition is pretty simple and HERE is a step by step on how to do that -- just select the partition to be active that is 100MB from the list partition command.

You can only have a single active partition.

And generally partitioning a single modern drive is not terribly useful. :)
 
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emy_girl72

Jul 1, 2018
5
0
20
I have created a bootable usb installer stick and I run windows startup repair. The repairing process was a failure. I initially wanted to reinstall windows but I wasn't sure that the problem would disappear. So I started to make inactive all the partitions, in a hope that I would leave active the one that will make my windows installed on C to boot.
And here comes the bad part: now I can't even boot from usb, if I could, I would post a picture of the partitions for you to help me restore the process.
I think I made inactive the partition that boot the usb stick, because several hours before that I could ran CMD from the startup repair menu from the usb, but now I can't access it anymore, :(
I am sure there should be a restore process, but I can't fint it.
I am glad I have found someone who understands my problem, though :)
 
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E

emy_girl72

Jul 1, 2018
5
0
20
So I've created a bootable cd. It seemed like the usb drive was broken
I entered cmd, selected disk 0, partition 1 (100 mb) srp, made it active and now my laptop works.
Thank you a lot, RealBeast! ❤
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
RealBeast

RealBeast

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Sep 13, 2010
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104,790
Great! Now go forth and teach others. :)

 
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