Can't get my bootloader straight

[hydroksyde]

Hi everyone,

I've just upgraded my laptop's hard drive, and managed to make a right mess of things. This has me quite stumped.

My laptop is a dell, and the factory install has 3 partitions:

DISKPART> list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset

------------- ---------------- ------- -------

Partition 1 OEM 39 MB 31 KB

Partition 2 Primary 12 GB 40 MB

Partition 3 Primary 919 GB 12 GB

Partition 1 contains a DOS installation and a few utilities. Partition 2 contains system recovery software, and the boot manager. Partition 3 contains the system.

When I make Partition 2 the active partition, the OS drive becomes D:, and my system wont boot. So I installed the PBR on partition 3, and made it active. It comes up the with bootmgr is missing error, so I know it's working, but when I copy bootmgr and all the c:\boot information to that drive, the boot manager will not load, and just comes up with a blinking cursor (no error message)

I have managed to boot my system by making partition 2 the active partition, and connecting a drive with a working boot manager to my laptop's eSATA port, and booting the c: partition.

I have run startup recover many times already, to no avail.

Any ideas? In particular why would bootmgr be failing to load? Or is there another way I could boot my system from the laptop's own hard drive?

[hydroksyde]

And just for reference, here's my BCD config (from the external drive).

C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager

--------------------

identifier {bootmgr}

device partition=C:

path \bootmgr

description Windows Boot Manager

locale en-US

inherit {globalsettings}

default {current}

resumeobject {1f8184a2-14de-11df-9734-f08c6d8c50b0}

displayorder {current}

{95429e2e-ecba-11e1-887f-e09d982da151}

toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}

timeout 10

displaybootmenu Yes

Windows Boot Loader

-------------------

identifier {current}

device partition=C:

path \Windows\system32\winload.exe

description Microsoft Windows 7

locale en-US

osdevice partition=C:

systemroot \Windows

resumeobject {5b01c5e5-ec16-11e1-acca-806e6f6e6963}

[Alan2273]

Could you clarify a few things, you say you have upgraded the hard drive, from that I assume you have put a new hard drive in your laptop, is that correct?.

And what is your make of laptop, is it an Inspiron, an optiplex or some other model?.