Fix boot loading chain on Windows 8.1 after change in partition list

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I am trying to boot a Dell XPS 17 laptop into an SSD drive and I experience a silent failure that I can't really figure out. From the looks of it, the bootloader chain is broken. I'm a one-person company and this computer is the thread to which my business hangs… so to speak.

The computer came with an OEM version of Windows 7, which I later replaced with a retail Windows 8.1 version of which I still have the box, CD and key included.

Previously, I had two HDDs and the first HDD, which I'm replacing with the SSD had 4 partitions:

  • a cryptic 109 MB partition
  • the factory-installed recovery partition (Windows 7)
  • the system drive (C:)
  • my data drive (D:)

Second HDD is for backups only and is not impacted by this issue. All drives have a 500 GB face capacity.

Migrating to the SSD

For the migration to the SSD, here are the actions I took:

  • I used CloneZilla to save images of HDD partitions 3 and 4 to an external HDD.
  • I used GParted to create two partitions on the SSD, the first one at 80 GB for the system, with a boot flag, and the rest for the data.
  • I restored the image from the external drive to the system partition on the SSD.

(I haven't restored my data partition yet, as I wanted to check first that the system could boot.)

Since then, I haven't been able to boot into Windows 8.1 on the SSD. The symptom is that I have a blinking cursor in text mode and no error messages at all, whether from the BIOS or from any bootloader.

Solutions I've tried

None of these "solutions" succeeded.

  1. Using boot-repair-disk from Sourceforge (not enough reputation for all links)
  2. Using the Repair feature from the Windows 8.1 boot disc.

1. boot-repair-disk

I've run it twice and this is the report it produced after the first time. The report lists an error:

According to the info in the boot sector, sda1 starts
at sector 41172992. But according to the info from
fdisk, sda1 starts at sector 2048.

2. Windows Repair Disc

I've booted into the CD three times and went into Troubleshoot > Advanced options each time. Nothing made the system boot.

The first time, the Start-up Repair option just shut the computer down without any warning. I believe it was then in the "Preparing Automatic Repair" phase.

The second time, I followed an article about how to fix the MBR and ended up issuing a bootrec.exe /fixmbr command.

The third time, I also experienced a brutal system shutdown (or restart) at a later stage than the first time, ie at "Diagnosing your PC".

The thing that I can't wrap my head around is that when opening a command line, I can list the files on drive C (on the SSD). Therefore, I figure all files are there. Moreover, chkdsk finds no issues on that drive.

In the wake of the bootrec /fixmbr command, and due to more reading while writing this question, I have also executed bootrec with its other three arguments, i.e. /fixboot, /scanos and /rebuildbcd. Where I had "Total identified Windows installations: 0" with /scanos, I now have "1", and boot-repair-disk's report now says a Windows MBR is installed in /dev/sda. Unfortunately, I still can't boot into my system.

Question

I'd really like to avoid reinstalling Windows from scratch, due to all the configuration of the many programs I use.

I suspect the problems lies in the error than I've quoted above and solving it lies in having the boot sector report that sda1 starts at sector 2048. How can that discrepancy be fixed? Or could the problem be different?

Best Answer

I could not, with the conditions I described in the question, fix the problem. It turned out that the problem was the absence of the the system-reserved partition that I referred to as the "cryptic partition". Once I wiped the disk clean and reinstalled the OS from scratch, I realized that the installation process created another "cryptic partition", which was this time at a 350 MB size.

The difference in size may be due to the fact that the original OS was Windows 7, and that system was upgraded to Windows 8.1. I guess, and it seems plausible to me, that when Windows 8.1 was installed over an existing Windows 7 system, it didn't move partitions nor did it need to recreate the "cryptic partition".

If I had also copied that partition, maybe that I would have not run into this problem.

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