Can't boot Windows 7 after deleting one of two Windows installations

Question

I have the foloowing problem. I had twp Windows 7 installations on two different hard drives. Boot manager was used to choose between them. I don't know how this came to be so I can't be sure what settings were there exactly. What was happening was after the GRUB menu, if I had selected the Windows option, I got to choose between two windows installations.

After formatting the hard drive that contained one of the windows installations the Windows boot broke. I tried fixing it throught grub, but it didn't work. All I got was

Bootmgr is missing Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

I tried resolving it using this guide, but it didn't help. What else can I do?

It's the first time I'm encountering this problem so I'm willing to fight it rather than just re-install, which would have taken less time than what I already spent on this.

Answer 1

So the problem was exactly that the boot manager was missing. It had been installed on the old Windows partition, so it was no more after the formatting. This rendered the repair tools useless as there was nothing to repair.

The solution is to create new boot manager using BCDEdit. Here you can read the tutorial for creating a fresh boot manager. Works like a charm more or less as is. You might want to watch out for the drive letter.

NB: If you have a x64 system don't be startled by the fact that it all boots from \windows\system32\... -- that wasted a good half an hour of my life.