It all started innocently enough. My brother needed a 1TB hard drive for his NAS RAID array, when one of his died. I had a spare, which I had used as a backup drive, in my machine. So I copied everything off it to my NAS (we both now have big NAS drives) and removed the hard drive from my system. I left for TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles without restarting my machine.

Well, I get a call from the guys at the studio on Monday. My machine simply says "Bootmgr Missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." Now, I run Windows Server 2008 which I have optimized for desktop use, which is really Vista 64-Bit at its core.

This has happened before, I thought. Every time you add or remove a hard drive on my system the BIOS takes all hard drives out of the boot order list. Curiously though, on this machine, you have to have a bootable CD or DVD in the CD-ROM drive in order for the system to boot.  You also have to make the CD-ROM drive the first device in the boot order list. When you get the "Press any Key to Boot from CD-ROM" message you just ignore it and it boot's up just fine. I never thought much of that.  So, I instructed Lawrence how to go into the BIOS and make the change. Interestingly, though, that didn't work. Not only that, but we weren't getting the "Press any key to boot from CD-ROM" message anymore. Hmmm...

We muddled through getting the shows published somehow, albeit late, and I attacked the problem when I got home from LA Friday night. Turns out the hard drive that has windows on it did NOT have the required boot files, and instead, when Windows was installed, it put the boot files on a different hard drive! Guess which one? Yep, the one I gave to my brother, which was now part of his NAS device... which it turns out didn't work for him. Crap.

The next several hours were painful. I went looking on the net for answers and found them, but my situation was just unique enough that there wasn't any complete solution out there.

I put the Windows DVD in the drive and booted it into the setup. You come to a screen where you can either install windows or repair an existing installation. Good. We're getting somewhere. It then shows you a list of existing Windows installations. Guess what? Nothing. Setup didn't recognize my existing installation. great.

There's an option to open a command window. I did. I started looking around at all the drives. The DVD had a boot directory and several files associated with it, and the system drive didn't. So, I copies those files over thinking that would at least give me a good start. Turned out I was right. I needed those files.

I figured out from web searches that I needed to run DISKPART and set the system partition as the active partition. First I needed to know the drive number and partition number. So, if you find yourself in this position, run DISKPART at the command prompt. You then enter in commands, which I've highlighted in red.

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online       466 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online       140 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online       140 GB      0 B

Once you know the disk number you select the disk you want to work with this way:

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

Then, you select the partition, but you need to know which one it is. Do this:

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            466 GB    32 KB

Now you can seelct the partition thusly:

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

Now just simply type

DISKPART> active

After you've made the system partition the active partition, then you need to fix and rebuild the BCD bootloader. type exit to get out of DISKPART, and from the command prompt enter:

bootrec /fixmbr

This worked. Great! Next step.

bootrec /fixboot

When I did this I got "Element not found." with no further explanation. Crap.

This one took me the hardest time to figure out. After hours and hours and hours, I somehow got the idea to remove all of the other hard drives in the system and try it again. That was the magic bullet. Once the other hard drives were removed, I found out I had to go back into DISKPART and set the active partition again.

After doing bootrec /fixbcd you have to do this:

bootrec /rebuildbcd

I was also getting Element not found on this one until I removed the other hard drives and set the correct partition as active.

So that was it. Everything worked and booted up just fine after that. I still can't help but wonder why this process is so difficult. If Windows Setup is going to possibly be writing boot records to drives other than the system drive, don't you think there should be an easier process for making that drive bootable.

I remember in the days of Windows 2000 and before, you could simply say "SYS C:" to make the C: drive bootable. I guess those days are gone.

I hope Windows 7 is easier to deal with.