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I have a Dell Precision laptop, with a Arch-Windows 7 dual boot, 64bits systems, GRUB2 as boot loader, and a single SSD.

I found myself browsing around for reasons which I will not explain to this page, which I tried to google translate. The system, for reasons unknown, freezed. I tried to fire task manager but it thrown an error (I don't remember the exact error), and then a scary blue screen appeared. I hard rebooted the system, and from that point the laptop wasn't able to boot anymore. Not even the GRUB appeared: I just got the "please insert bootable device" error.

I managed to boot with an ubuntu live USB. From ubuntu I used fdisk -l and found out that while the SSD was detected, the partition table was given as corrupted.

Fortunately, testdisk was still able to detect the partitions. Using it I magened to kind of recover the partitions. With this I mean that for example lsblk and fdisk show the partition and I was able to mount them.

I tried to repair the partition table with testdisk, and then with gdisk, but nothing. Booting from a gparted live distribution I can see with gparted the (seemingly) correct partition scheme, i.e.:

Partizione  File System Etichetta   Dimensione  Usato       Libero      Flag
/dev/sda1   fat16               39.19 MiB   217 KiB     38.98 MiB   Boot
/dev/sda2   ntfs        RECOVERY    11.73 GiB   9.78 GiB    1.96 GiB
/dev/sda3   ntfs        OS      187.63 GiB  ---     ---
/dev/sda4   extended            39.07 GiB   ---     ---     lba
 |
 -> /dev/sda5   ext4                39.07 GiB   16.14 GiB   22.93 GiB

with a warning on /dev/sda3 from gparted which says to not be able to read the partition possibly due to the lack of ntfs packages.

What is happening? And how can I recover from this situation?

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1 Answer 1

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The boot partition (fat16) is small - only 39 MB. This can create problems.

You could try to fix only MBR and boot records and see if this would be enough to boot Windows 7.

Rewrite MBR and boot record of sda1(boot partition) to Windows 7 format (NT6 format) using a Linux live CD/USB (testdisk can write boot records).

Usually for fixing Windows 7 boot problems you need a Windows 7 installation/recovery USB/DVD - see here how to proceed.

After you have fixed Windows 7 booting you can go on and fix ARCH (GRUB2) booting using a Linux live USB/DVD.

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  • Thanks for the answer. How large should the boot partition be? Also, I'm not sure if you're suggesting to try to fix the problem with testdisk or with a Windows installation disk
    – glS
    Commented Oct 17, 2015 at 9:28
  • Boot partition(Microsoft names it "system partition" - where boot files are) is usually 100-500MB. Any tool that can write MBR and PBR to Windows 7 format (if you have Windows 7 use bootsect.exe - would be best). MOVING OR RESIZING PARTITIONS CAUSES BOOT PROBLEMS!!! (Then you have to fix boot manager/loader with bcdboot.exe)
    – snayob
    Commented Oct 18, 2015 at 11:34

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