Newb with major MBR problem

Hate to jump into a group without saying hi! I've been on other forums and I know this is a pretty major first post question, but I'm out of options.

Anybody kind enough to help will get a gracious thank you!

Here's what I did:

I had been using an old SSD to multiboot XP and 7/64bit. Wanted to add Ubuntu, but was running out of room.

Bought a bigger SSD and planned to virtualize instead of multiboot. I used Acronis (Seagate disk wizard) to just image the win 7 partition. Restored and made it C: on the new drive. Shut down and moved the new drive to SATA port of original drive

Got "MBR error 1" so, did Bootrec /fixmbr, didn't fix it

Downloaded MBRfix64 and ran it with various parameters. Didn't fix it.

Put the old drive back in and got "MBR error 1", YIKES!

Everything works fine if I boot from the windows CD and just don't hit a key. The new drive boots directly to win 7. The old drive still dual boots just like it always did.

It's clear that the programs are all there and that boot.ini is correctly configured on each drive.

Something is wrong in the boot that is bypassed by using the DVD to boot from. I've kinda done all I know and am humbly willing to accept help if anyone knows how.-o

Truly thanks in advance...

 

It sounds like the motherboard is finding a broken or incompatible boot sector or device.

Firstly I'd make sure you disable 'boot other device' in bios, also make sure your hard drive is setup as the first boot device in 'boot order', remove any disks or thumb drives.

Just after the POST screen hit F11 or F12 'depends on the motherboard' to open boot window and set the OS you wish to load first, look for any old or broken OS's in here it could be one of them causing the problem.

If none of this fixes it find a setting called AHCI if it's disabled enable it, if it's enabled disable it, doing this may cause or or more of your other operating systems to stop working though so leave it until last.

This is pretty complex post to answer your triple booting operating systems and also running cloned drives you could run into any number of problems, I would be very tempted to start again with fresh installs of windows, make sure AHCI is enabled before you begin the installs if you choose this route.

 

Thanks Rikky, I'll try all that this weekend when I have time. At least it's something to try!

 

Just to let you know, it ended up being that I had two drives from the same manufacturer and set the wrong one up as the boot drive in BIOS. It was a simple fix. It was trying to boot from the wrong drive...

 

Been there, done that!! A pair of Seagates, 500GB.


:-o

 

Yeah, and it would have been fine if I hadn't spent 5-6 hours researching and trying other fixes! :cry

I can't even imagine how many times I rewrote the MBR. It's surprising it still worked when I finally figured it out.

Anyway, it's working great and I finally got rid of my last platter drive.

 

Small mistake, big problem

Thanks for the update