I have a Fujitsu / Siemens PC with Windows Vista installed and I am trying to repair it after I had to replace the motherboard: The hard disk has three Windows partitions (partition 2 is marked as bootable). I checked this using Linux RIP, which I had booted from a USB stick.
I have got hold of the original Windows Vista System recovery DVD for this model and I am trying to repair the operating system.
I have the following problem. When I start the DVD, after showing the progress bar for a a few seconds, the screen turns black and only displays the mouse cursor. It then stays like this for ages and I have to reboot.
I then had the idea of marking the partitions as non-Windows (did it again using RIP Linux, fdisk). Now the DVD boots into the Windows installer but it does not see the partitions it has to repair.
Has anyone encountered this problem already? Any clue as to how to solve this (I want to boot from the recovery DVD and then try and repair the existing partitions)?
EDIT 1
Thanks for the suggestions on the forum and in chat. Copying the first 440 bytes from a working Windows Vista partition and writing them to the MBR and the bootable partition of the broken system has solved the problem.
EDIT 2
Here is the happy end.
Unfortunately, partitions 1 and 2 (where the old system was) were too compromised to recover. Partition 3, containing the data I wanted to recover, was damaged too, so it was not possible to copy out all the files contained in it.
After fixing the boot record problem I booted again into RIP Linux, recreated partitions 1 and 2 (I do not know why, but Windows could see them right after boot and later could not see them any more. So, I am not sure if the partition table is stored in two different places and these copies had become inconsistent, but to be sure I just deleted these two partitions using fdisk and created them again).
I then put a fresh ntfs on both partitions and rebooted from Linux into the Windows installation again. This time Windows installed without a problem. It then detected partition 3 (drive D:) which I had not touched and scanned it. It fixed the errors on the file system and all the photos (some family photos) seem to be back.
Once more thanks to lornix for the hints.