How do I fix my MBR when windows 7 system recovery shows no drive

Question

I accidentally pulled the power plug when my system was starting up, and I started to get a boot error after POST. Something like "something not found, insert a bootable disk and press enter"

So I put in my windows 7 x64 CD - and clicked through repair computer. At the system recovery options screen, there are no drives listed. (There is only one drive in the computer)

Even if I click through the use recovery tools option (without selecting a drive), and enter command prompt - typing C: gives me this error:

X:\Sources>c:
The system cannot find the drive specified.
X:\Sources>

So I pulled the drive out, and attached it to a different computer. I went into disk management - and oddly the drive shows 128GB (it's a 64gb drive) and the area next to it is black. I clicked simple partition (which works), but when I try to format - it gives me an error that it's unable to format the drive.

I would prefer to not format the drive if possible...there is one file that is important (I know i can recover it with some program, I just don't want to if avoidable)

How do I fix this?

EDIT:

I can now access C: in the windows 7 DVD recovery tools command prompt - what do i do now?

Answer 1

You should check whether or not you can even see the drive in BIOS. If you can't then it isn't the drive's problem. . .

edit

Now that you are able to see the drive, you need to fix the MBR. I would follow these steps:

I recommend the bootrec command.

First try bootrec /fixmbr then try bootrec /fixboot

Then, if that doesn't work, try rebuilding the BCD. Microsoft's original instructions has you exporting the old BCD. To heck with that.

cd c:\boot attrib bcd -s -h -r ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old bootrec /RebuildBcd