I have encountered the following situation today:
I have a computer with one physical hard drive divided into two partitions. On drive C there were Windows 7 installed, and I wanted to re-install Windows (it was 32-bit, but I wanted 64-bit…)
I could not get any CD or USB device to work with it, so I did the following:
- Mounted a virtual drive with a Windows 7 installation, and I installed Windows 7 on the D drive
- Formatted the C drive
- Afterwards, I knew what was coming to me and was very afraid to restart the computer, yet after setting some settings (setting drive D as the primary and active…) I took the courage and reset the computer, but I wasn't surprised to get a "bootmgr is missing" error…
So here I am, needing to use a repair tool, but without any DVD/CD/usb … so I grabbed out the hard drive from the computer and inserted it to another computer I have… There I tried using the AOMEI partition assistant to fix the MBR, move the D drive to the beginning of the physical drive and some other failed attempts…
Afterwards I used VMware, and mounted the entire physical drive, got the "bootmgr is missing" error in the VM, loaded the Windows CD to the VM (I really thought I would get it this time…) and encountered a weird error that I could not fix…
I searched a bit at the web and found no help…
Finally I gave up and went to look for a USB\CD… I got one used Windows 7 repair option and all worked…
But I am really interested of knowing, I had no other choice? Am I limited to the USB/CD when I actually had access to the drive (on the other computer…)? I just cannot accept that…
And another question: Before I reset the computer (after formatting drive C), could I have done anything to avoid this annoying situation?
Best Answer
Horatio pointed out a flaw in this answer... because in this case the poster couldn't get an F8 menu, his MBR being screwed.
(But if one could get an F8 menu!)
Windows 7 naturally has a repair option. You hit F8 twice and it's there in the menu.
But if you mean a repair installation, which reinstalls Windows overitself, like Windows XP could. Well, Windows 7 can't even do that off the CD, unless you are already in Windows which makes it a bit useless. (Note: Actually I see a 're-install windows' option at the bottom, second picture. Maybe that is like the old repair installation though possibly only works from within Windows).
But a Windows 7 repair, yeah it's built in.
Windows XP has a "repair from recovery console", and you could install it so it appeared in F8 (though you may have had to push F8 twice to get to it). Windows 7's repair is built in the F8 (F8 twice) menu already. And it has a Windows 7 boot up command prompt (equivalent to the recovery console), and it has a repair thing in there. As well as a system restore option and an option to restore from an image.
I once tried repairing a Windows 7 machine off a CD, and I had to get past an error to do it, whereas the internal one, doing F8 twice, and picking repair, worked fine, and there was no weird error dialog box I had to close.
The Windows 7 repair sometimes needs to be run a few times... That is, until it says no errors.