MBR problems

[steiner666]

Ok i recently had to replace a motherboard in one of my PCs and i'm running into some issues getting win7 back on to it.

First off, i have no optical or external drives, only internal SATA drives. So what i did was put mounted the win7.iso and copied the files onto a freshly formatted internal sata drive and hooked it up to sata port 2 in the PC i'm working on. I was able to get windows7 installed to the proper drive, but when i remove the drive with the setup files on it i get no MBR errors when i try to boot.

I've tried a lot of things. I've tried going into repair and doing start up repair and it doesnt detect any problems, i've gone into the command prompt and created a boot directory on the C: drive because there was non and copied everything from the setup drive that i could find that had anything to do with boot or MBR. I tried running the /fixmbr and /fixboot and all that and still no boot unless this second drive is plugged in. I even installed daemon and mounted the ISO in windows on this PC and tried reinstalling windows from within windows with the second drive unplugged but i just get an error when its extracting temporary files.

I can get into windows 7 just fine on the PC, so if theres anythign I can do within windows that would be great. I just need to move or create an MBR on the C: drive.

 

[steiner666]

thought i'd post a follow up for the sake of anyone else who might have a similar problem and who stumbles on this pathetic, other wise unhelpful thread. I was able to fix my problems shortly after my original post by using EasyBCD. you can install it and run it in windows and it will automatically repair missing boot info from right in windows.

 

[Hawkeye22]

For future reference, you can install off a USB thumb drive too. This would have prevented the problem. This is why whenever I install an OS, I make sure only the drive I want to install the OS onto is connected. I unplug all other hard drives.

 

[steiner666]

i couldnt install from a thumb drive because the largest one i currently have is 2GB sinc emy 8 took a crap on me. I tried using a 4GB SD card in a USB adapter but that didnt work.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Unfortunately some adapters just don't seem to work properly. Get a bigger USB drive or burn an ISO to CD/DVD.

 

[Zoron]

An optical drive is practically an absolute necessity... unless you have a netbook... why would you not have one?