Windows 7 not booting after failed SRT (SSD caching) install
- by david
This is a fairly new computer, only about a month old.
i7 2700k, z68 motherboard, with a 1.5tb WD black HD, and a 128gb crucial M4 ssd.
I followed the instructions for setting up ssd caching, the SATA controller was set to RAID, I installed the intel software and enabled acceleration and it said everything went fine.
But when I went to reboot, I received the lovely "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" error message.
I checked the bios, and it was booting from the correct HD (I tried the only other option anyway just in case, it was the ~50 odd gb of unformatted space left on the SSD)
AFter that I entered the raid until (ctrl-i at boot) and removed the acceleration and deleted the raid array (because it was being used as a cache this was non destructive)
Still no boot.
So I reinstalled win7 directly on the SSD, booted, and checked the HDD to make sure it hadn't been wiped. It hadn't, all the files were still there, including all the windows stuff.
I backed up my data to an external drive just in case, but I'd really like to get this install booting again.
I trawled the webs a bit, and have tried entering recovery mode and using the bootrec.exe and bootsect.exe to fix it, but to be honest I'm not sure what I'm doing with those.
My question is basically: How do I make my harddrive bootable again?