Question Making a Win 7 disk bootable

[Perryg114]

I am trying to restore an old Win 7 Acronis 12 disk image to a new hard drive. The data is there but it won't boot. It says no OS. So I am assuming that it can't find the boot sector. I did not back up the boot sector so how do I fix this and make it bootable. Acronis 12 is a pain in the backside. It won't just give me an option in there to make the disk bootable. I also have disk director 10 and did not see a way to fix there boot sector there either. Any ideas?

 

[WilliamM2]

Try a Windows 7 recovery disk, there are several repair options, or you can go to a commant prompt and try to fix mbr.
If you don't have a recovery disk, a regular install disk will work, just choose repair instead of install, and the same options will come up.

Good luck.

https://www.lifewire.com/system-recovery-options-2626021

 

[Perryg114]

I tried the repair options on the Win 7 install disk. No joy. I have a recovery partition that is part of the dell installation but no idea how to restore from that partition and can't find much on the dell websight. Why the heck do they have a recovery partition if you can't do anything with it.

Anyone have ideas on how to recover using the recovery partition?

 

[Ajay]

This may help: https://www.diskpart.com/windows-10/fix-mbr-windows-10-0708.html

Good luck!

 

[WilliamM2]

I tried the repair options on the Win 7 install disk. No joy. I have a recovery partition that is part of the dell installation but no idea how to restore from that partition and can't find much on the dell websight. Why the heck do they have a recovery partition if you can't do anything with it.

Anyone have ideas on how to recover using the recovery partition?

With most OEM's it just restores it to factory settings, and will wipe all your data. And put all the Dell bloatware back on there.
If you don't have anything on there you need, it's easiest to just install Win 7 again.

Although if you are going to do that, install an operating system that is still supported, like Win 10.

 

[tcsenter]

I am trying to restore an old Win 7 Acronis 12 disk image to a new hard drive. The data is there but it won't boot. It says no OS. So I am assuming that it can't find the boot sector. I did not back up the boot sector so how do I fix this and make it bootable. Acronis 12 is a pain in the backside. It won't just give me an option in there to make the disk bootable. I also have disk director 10 and did not see a way to fix there boot sector there either. Any ideas?

Make sure all other potential boot disks are unplugged except the one you are working with or boot from. Was the image created from the same system? Is there any user data on the image that you want to recover? If not, just wipe and install fresh copy of Windows again.

See also Acronis User/Support Forums

 

[igor_kavinski]

One thing worth trying is to install normal Windows 7 on a hard drive. Then replace the C drive on it with your Acronis image. You may need something like Acronis Disk Director to do the partition overwriting. It would be easier if you install the dummy Win7 on a separate hard drive. Then just delete the C partition on that drive and copy over your Acronis image C partition from the other drive.