svtfmook

incase anyone runs into this problem...

my situation, i have a RAID 0 setup, and a SATA dvd burner. with RAID enabled, my BIOS does not recognize my DVD drive, no matter what port it's plugged into, therefor, i cannot boot to it. when i installed my windows 7, i deleted my vista partition... and bootmgr right a long with it. i originally installed 7 from within vista, which installed it to U: drive, but i didn't have to boot from the dvd.

what i did to fix it was in installed a spare hdd that i had laying around. i set my sata to IDE (disabling my RAID setup, but being able to boot from my dvd). installed 7 on my spare drive. enabled ahci in the new 7 setup.

back into bios i enabled my RAID setup, but kept the spare drive as the primary boot. booted into the spare system.

there here's the process to copy bootmgr and Boot folder to the RAID setup, then edit the BCD to boot correctly (found after an hour of googling). consider HDD1 my RAID setup and HDD3 as my spare drive

The boot files consist of a folder called "Boot" and an application called "bootmgr". They are system files, and so are normally hidden. You must make them visible.

Copy them both from HDD3 to HDD1. It will complain that two files cannot be copied: "BCD" and "BCD.log", both of which are in the "Boot" folder. The latter is unimportant (its just a log file) and can be ignored; the former will be copied in the next step.

Open a command prompt with Administrator privileges. Type the following command "bcdedit /export HDD1:\Boot\BCD", where HDD1 is the driver letter of your destination drive. In my case, HDD1 was C, so the command was "bcdedit /export C:\Boot\BCD".

Now, you have to edit the BCD file so that the entries are all correct. I used the bcdedit program which comes with Windows 7, but there are others. I've heard EasyBCD is pretty good (and free), but the latest version doesn't fully support Windows 7. I believe a new version that does support Windows 7 will be out shortly. First, I navigate to HDD1\Boot on the command prompt (with Admin privileges) and type "bcdedit /store BCD /enum ALL". I use the /store switch to specify the BCD file in the current directory - omitting this switch will use the default one I think, which is on HDD3. This command lists all the entries in the BCD file.

I scanned the entries, and it turns out that the entries for {bootmgr} and {memdiag} both point to HDD3. Of course, I want them to point to HDD1. So I issue commands in the following form: "bcdedit /store BCD /set [entry name] device partition=HDD1:". Since HDD1 is C on my machine, I would type the following to set the {bootmgr} entry: "bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:".

then all i had to do was change the boot drive to my RAID setup in BIOS

i know this isn't a common problem, but not having the option of booting to a sata dvd with RAID enabled is a difficult fix (saved me a 20 minute drive to microcenter and $25 for a new IDE dvd burner). so i'll leave this here incase anyone else runs into this crappy situation.

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GRiD Crash Club
xfire: csimook
Opteron 165 @ 2997MHz
Opteron 165 @ 3GHz

tom.slick

Would it not be just a little bit easier to have just done the repair from a flash drive?
Just like installing from a flash drive, but a system repair.
But good going on repairing your system

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Core i7 4Ghz+ Club

svtfmook

i don't have any flash drives. also, a lot of the older motherboards do not allow booting from usb flash devices. i know my old asus a8n sli deluxe didn't, atleast not with the bios version i had.

either way, it's not as difficult as it looks. took me a total of about 3 minutes to do not counting installing windows 7 on the spare drive. and now i have an emergency back up drive to boot incase something else happens.

__________________
GRiD Crash Club
xfire: csimook
Opteron 165 @ 2997MHz
Opteron 165 @ 3GHz