I searched around and could not find a post or solution for the same situation I am having, so I am going to describe what happened/happens below:
I have Windows 7 Home Premium installed on my Medion laptop. The hard drive is 1 TB and is partitioned into 3 partitions: System - 100 MB NTFS, OS - 130.50 GB NTFS and Files - 700.50 GB NTFS. The rest of the space is about 100 GB unallocated space.
Previously the Files partition was 100 GB larger, but I shrunk it by 100 GB using Windows Disk Management and was able to reboot without any problem.
I want to install Windows 8.1 Pro on the rest of the space to be able to dual boot my computer. Using the Windows Disk Management program when I create a new simple volume using the rest of the 100 GB on the hard drive, it makes an extended partition logical drive.
From there on it seems to be fine and I can continue to use the computer like normal. But when I reboot the computer, it does not start anymore. It turns on, but just shows a black screen. There is no cursor or options, just emptiness.
If I try to insert my Windows 7 recovery disc and turn the computer off and on again, still nothing happens.
So I took out the hard drive and inserted another hard drive and installed Windows 7 onto that. When I plug in the original hard drive using an external hard drive enclosure to check it with Windows Disk Management, I can still see the partitions on it just fine, along with the newly created volume. I can also access the files on it just fine too.
It does seem that the System, Boot, Page File and Crash Dump statuses that were previously on the two System and OS partitions are now not indicated anymore. (The System partition status was System, Active, Primary Partition. The OS partition status was Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition.) (Now the System partition shows only Active, Primary Partition and the OS partition shows only Primary Partition.)
I have a system image and my files backed up, so I removed the original hard drive's partitions and made a new simple volume for the whole hard drive, and restored the operating system from my system image backup using the Windows Recovery Disc, thinking I had made a mistake somewhere. I repeated the whole process, and the same thing happened...black screen when booting.
Why does creating this partition like this make the computer not boot?