Windows 7 will not boot anymore

Here's the deal. I have a custom PC that runs Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and it has worked fine since I built it a year or so ago.

The other day, I reformatted my mom's hard drive for her. It is a SATA II HDD, I connected it to my motherboard, booted to the Windows XP Pro 32 bit disc, reformatted her hard drive, and installed Windows XP Pro 32 bit on it.

After removing her hard drive from my computer, my system is no longer useable. Windows 7 will not boot at all. Insterting my Windows 7 disc and trying to repair the install does not work at all, the disc shows my Windows 7 installation but if I try to repair it it simply says it's the wrong version for the disc, which is absolutely false.

How on God's earth do I fix what I have done? I am ready to dump this thing forever and buy a laptop.

 

Your mistake was to allow the XP install to see your Win 7 as it booted up for the first time. At that point the system was seeing two drives both with the Active flag set and has probably written an XP style MBR to your Win 7 disk and XP was using that to get started. When you put the XP disk in another computer it almost certainly won't boot either.

The damage is only to the MBR and possibly the PBR and should be repairable but you need access to an expert to carry it out. Bit beyond my abilities I'm afraid.

 

Ok, thank you for that information. I will not repeat this mistake in the future now.

I just used my Windows 7 disk to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows 7 from scratch but I'm having a small issue I hope someone can help me with. Windows 7 installs and boots fine, but every time I start my computer it sends me to a screen that says,,,

"Windows Boot Manager

Choose an operating to start, or press TAB to select a tool:

Earlier Version of Windows
Windows 7"

How do I make this screen go away forever and have my computer automatically boot to Windows 7 like it always has before I messed it up?

 

I reckon if you follow the guidance on this page, particularly the Tip, and set the timer to zero you should get what you want. There are other ways of course but this may be the easiest.