Deleted the tiny partitions on my HD leaving only the C: partition. Now it won't boot.

[Pentacore]

I did a very dumb thing. I noticed my hard drive had a lot of smaller partitions, 4 of them to be exact. One was I think 900 MB which probably contained the factory restore information for my Dell, and the others were very tiny, 3MB in size. I deleted all 4 of these so I would only have a C: partition using a tool called AOMEI Partition Assistant. Now the machine won't boot. I used WinPE to boot the machine and gain access to the drive so I have a copy of my data, but I'm wondering if there is any way I can make the C: partition bootable. I used FDISK and set the C partition to ACTIVE and that didn't work. I can always just re-install everything from scratch but I'm just trying to avoid that by somehow getting this partition to boot.

Thanks for any help!

 

[daveybrat]

One of those small partitions most likely contained the boot record on it. You'll have to google how to repair and create a new boot record. Granted it can't always be done and a lot of times it just ends in a format and reinstall.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, at this point, if you've got your data from that partition backed up, then just re-install. Consider the freshness of the install to be a bonus.

 

[C1]

Funny as last night I was setting up multi-boot system and a similar thing happened to me.

As I recall, a copy of the mbr is retained for backup.

I booted from the Windows 7 CD disk, then in the lower left of the "Install" screen there is a hyperlink option for "Repair Windows". Click on "Repair" and that brings up a screen of options. Select the Command Line option. At the Command Line type "bootrec \fixmbr" .

You should get a message that says "operation completed succesfully.

You can now exit and reboot should get you back into your OS.

In accordance with daveybrat, look at the directions below first also before you proceed:

The instructions are:

• Boot from the original installation DVD (or the recovery USB)
• At the Welcome screen, click Repair your computer.
• Choose Troubleshoot.
• Choose Command Prompt.
• When the Command Prompt loads, type the following commands: bootrec /FixMbr bootrec /FixBoot bootrec /ScanOs bootrec /RebuildBcd.

If none of that works then that might be because the partition deletes have changed things too much.

A straight "Windows Repair" should work and not change your data and installed programs on the original C partition.