Gents, I know I was stupid but here's the story. I was doing the final touches on a Box I rebuilt for my Brother. It was about 1:30 am and I was tired and I nuked (formatted) the 100 MB Recovery Partition of Win7 Ultimate when running in XP SP3 -on a separate drive. I mistakenly though it was a 100 Gig (I know Meg) Hard Drive I slid into a Hot Swap Tray to test that functionality in both XP, and Win7, with the new Gigabyte MB. When I realised my error, I attempted to Boot to the Win7 drive but got a start-up error. So when Win7 detected the error and suggested I let it repair the issue, of course I said yes. I tried it a couple of times and it finally Booted to Win7 as normal. (Prior to this issue Win7 worked flawlessly => every time it booted.) But now it's very hit or miss. (Mostly miss ). I did make a Microsoft Back-up using a Dual Layer Disk of the image, that should allow me to re-image, but that was without many, many, programs. Contemplating using the Back-up, I made a Ghost 14 image of the Operating System Partition. I am thinking I could use the Microsoft Back-up, and then blow the Ghost image over the Operating Partiton after Win7 is restored. But this seems a long way around to restore the 100 MB recover Partition. Do you know of a way to restore this partition without blowing away the Win7 Operating partition? Thanks for the assist.
I assume you mean the system partition which is not a recovery partition. Boot Windows 7 and use the diskmanagement component of computer management tool (control panel->administrative tools->computer mahagement->disk management) - this will show the partition layout of your disks - disk0 in the form Win7 creates has a system partition of 100 MB plus the os partition (and any others you created) The system partition is the partition Win 7 uses to boot. If it is no longer there then Win 7 repair must have setup to boot from the OS partition which is perfectly valid - you can setup win7 without the 100 MB partition during setup if you want. If the 100 MB partition is missing then Win7 will probably have problems as it was installed with it there and system repair will only do a hit and miss fix up. Remember, M$ only want you using their products so their backup and repair tools are pure vanilla and usually only work with default setups - you may have changed that irrevocably by deleting the system partition and it will probably never be reliable and may start random bluescreens etc. I would simply bite the bullet and re-install everything - as you said the backups you created have a lot missing. I would create an OS partition of about 60 GB, Win7 will also create the 100 MB system partition and then I would create a partition with the remaining disk space to hold data etc - you can move all your user data files anywhere you like and removing them from C: means you don't lose it if the OS goes belly up - like most M$ OSs do at some time. This makes your backup strategy easier and you can use the data partition as the backup location rather than removable (and slow) medium. Oh, and to answer your last question - no I don't know any way to restore it other than using backups - does Windows backup (I don't use it or ghost) allow you to restore only the system partition or does it require the lot? Some backup programs - the good ones I mean - allow real freedom with backup, restore and even mounting a backup as a virtual disk so you can recover individual files. Even if it restores it it is highly probable your system will be so compromised by this time that I would rather re-install.
I use Acronis True Image 2010. It backs up System State, Program State and Personal stuff aswell. I tried Ghost 14 but it doesn't do it for me. I also use Easy BCD 2.0 to back up bootup just incase things go wrong with my triple boot Win7, XP and Ubuntu.
if you boot using your win 7 install dvd, get to a command prompt, and then use diskpart to clean and recreate the 100mb partition with ntfs file system. you must mark this partition active. then you can use bootrec.exe /createstore to write the required files to the 100mb partition. finally, you can exit out of the command prompt, and choose repair. the windows tools should now recognize the 100mb partition as a system reserved partition to boot from. it will rewrite bootmgr and the required bootmgr configuration files. i just did this over the weekend. diskpart is not intuitive but every command has help. i hope this leads in the right direction for you. gh
Re: I used Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery software which is good for partition recovery.the software comes with a free trial version which can show you the recovered files on preview if it actually recovers your data.If the files are recoverable with this software then go for the full download..cheers
As of Norton Ghost v15 and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 (v9), I finally dumped Acronis. Prior to that I swore by them but without going into details unless anyone asks, Norton/Symantec is much more robust. Plus it helps a lot with my RAID setups that it's emergency disc uses WinPE v2.x, making it easy to load Windows drivers. You can have it put the emergency disc on your hard drive with an option to boot it in Windows' boot menu, too, just like Acronis but a lot more reliable and flexible.
Gents, Sorry for the delay in my response. I decided to bite the bullet and do a full clean install with all applications. Then I used Ghost 15 to image it. (My experience with Acronis was not positive...) Thanks for the suggestions and insight.