Today my Win7 computer stopped booting. Yesterday it was fine. I determined that the master boot record was corrupt so I created a Win7 bootable USB drive and ran the startup repair utility and allegedly fixed the errors.
I rebooted to the SSD, expecting it to be fixed but I get the same boot errors as before. Then I rebooted to USB to rerun the startup repair but ... my full Windows instance comes up!
The process is repeatable.
- Boot to SSD = no boot media
- Boot to USB = boots full Windows from SSD
What is happening? How do I get my BIOS to boot to the SSD properly?
UPDATE
I didn't think of this when I originally wrote the question, but now, after doing my investigating, I connected a few dots that seem to be very important. I realized that the root cause of all of this happening is that when I originally installed this copy of Windows, I had had another HDD with another instance of Windows installed on it. The booting must have stopped working when I removed the older HDD, thus removing the MBR for the computer.