Boot Camp - Win 7 - Hardware error (harddrive, I'm guessing)

halberdier25

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Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,3
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP53.00AC.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.48f2

Installed Win7 on a bootcamp partition late last week (ran into some issues and had to do a HDD reformat and restore out of Time Machine). Had it up and running fine. Today I went to boot into Windows and got a system error page, saying hardware settings had changed and that it couldn't boot. I popped in my Win7 disk and tried a system repair to no avail. I checked out the details and it looked like it was trying to boot from the Mac OS partition (the error System Repair came back with was "no OS on drive"). It told me to run chkdsk utility, but I don't know oodles about that. I tried "chkdsk" in cmd and it didn't do anything.

So, I go back to booting into Mac OS and check the BOOTCAMP partition. It doesn't show anything. It says "0 items, 19.12GB available" which means that stuff is taken up (it's a 50GB partition), and that ~30GB more or less corresponds to Win7 plus what I've installed.

TL;DR: So, the situation is as follows:

Boot into Windows: get the normal wait time, then the hardware error
Boot off of Windows Disk: boots from disk, but cannot repair system
Boot into Mac: Nothing shows on boot camp partition, but space is taken up

Do I need to reformat the Windows partition and start from scratch?

Thanks,
 
I cannot help you other than the chkdsk: Run
chkdsk /f c:
. It should tell you that you have to reboot. When booting, Windows asks if you like to run chkdsk.

I rebooted Windows 7 on my PC (dual boot: Windows/Linux) when it was on booting sequence. Windows 7 trashed its files quite hard. I run not only chkdsk, but also sfs (most likely with /scannow). It seems the system is working now. I guess sfs is mainly meant for malware protection.
 
Hello, the same happened to me when I deleted a partition under mac OSX. I think, the master boot record (MBP) of your windows partition was modified. You can examine if your partition are correct with the "partition inspector" app. Here's the link: http://forums.macrumors.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=265536&d=1293502544.

If there's something wrong with the MPB it will tell you and ask if you want to fix it. If this doesn't work, then probably, the whole windows partition was erased. If so, make a backup of the entire windows partition (the whole system), erase it, make a new bootcamp partition under osx. Finally copy the backup to the partition. This way you shouldn't need to re-install windows and all your apps.

Hope you'll fix it, cheers.
 
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