Windows 7 I marked my external hard drive as active and now windows won't boot

[patatesboy]

Hello I'm new to these forums. What happened to my computer is, I kept getting the BSOD, I went into safe mode, removed the most recent programs I had installed, and it stopped happening. I then proceeded to plug in my external hard drive. It was not recognizing it for some reason, so I went to disk management. It was listed there, just without a drive letter. I tried to assign it a drive letter, and it gave me an error message saying something about refreshing the list, (this is the error message I should have researched), I tried refreshing the drive list, and tried reassigning the drive letter, same message. I right clicked on the drive again, and I saw mark as active. For some stupid reason, I clicked on this. Then seeing that it didn't do anything, I thought maybe restarting the computer would maybe do the trick. Now my computer won't boot. It gets to the windows logo, and boom, restarts all over again. I tried many things like, startup repair, system restore, marking partition as active CMD, with diskpart, I also tried some of the commands in bootrec.exe. By the way, if this helps at all, my hard drive is a solid state drive, I also have a slave drive in there which does also have a copy of windows installed on it, (it was my old hard drive), I tried setting that as my primary boot and it boots into my old install of windows, before i got my solid state drive. Is there a way I can fix the startup by having access to it from an operating system instead of the recovery environment?

 

[patcooke]

Download Easeus free partition manager from here:

Easeus Partition Recovery - CNET Download.com

Burn a bootable cd, boot from it and use it to set your system drive as the active partition.

 

[patatesboy]

Download Easeus free partition manager from here:

Easeus Partition Recovery - CNET Download.com

Burn a bootable cd, boot from it and use it to set your system drive as the active partition.

THanks for the reply. I used partition wizard to set as active, and I've also used cmd from windows 7 recovery to set it as active. All it's doing now is it gets to the windows logo after my bios, the little animation starts, and when the windows logo is halfway being formed, cuts off and reboots all over again. I pressed f8 and boot in that debugging mode where it creates a log file, once I get home, I'm going to post that log file cause I have no idea what I'd be looking at. The way you suggested above, would that be move effective than the methods I used, or would it be the same thing?

 

[patatesboy]

Oh, and I have this message when startup repair fails

Problem signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem signature 03: unknown
Problem signature 04: 21200146
Problem signature 05: ExternalMedia
Problem signature 06: 10
Problem signature 07: BadDriver
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1

 

[patcooke]

I would expect partition wizard and easeus to function similarly - but you never know! When you ran in command mode from win recovery did you run these coomands to repair the boot process:

bootrec /RebuildBcd
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

 

[patatesboy]

I would expect partition wizard and easeus to function similarly - but you never know! When you ran in command mode from win recovery did you run these coomands to repair the boot process:

bootrec /RebuildBcd
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

Yeah, I'll try that out, and yes I did run those bootrec commands. I'm gonna post the boot log error when I get home. (that option when you hit f8 to debug startup)

 

[patatesboy]

Hello, I can't seem to be able to create a bootable iso for easus. Here is that log file I was talking about though. Link Removed

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Does it still fail to boot with the external drive disconnected?
If you can boot it to your old operating system try looking at the boot setup with EasyBCD.

It will let you remove any boot entries you don't want and tell it to boot to you primary hard drive.
And it can be run from any Windows install on the computer.

EasyBCD - CNET Download.com

Mike

 

[patcooke]

Hello, I can't seem to be able to create a bootable iso for easus. Here is that log file I was talking about though. View attachment 22289

On my version of easeus the "create bootable disk" is under tools in the partition manager.