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SOLVED!

After 3 hours of troubleshooting, I have found the solution to this problem!

It is caused by a corrupt or damaged boot option in the MBR.

It is especially common on hard drives that contain multiple partitions (ie. almost all OEM installs).

Sometimes the MBR just becomes damaged, other times a boot virus is the cause.

In any case, heres what fixes it:

Boot into recovery manager via a Win7 DVD or via the built in system repair option.

If you use the Win7DVD, click next and then choose the option to Repair your computer.

If you use the built in system repair option, cancel any automatic repairs that may start.

Choose the advanced recovery options, and then choose the command prompt.

Enter the following command: bcdedit /enum

This is the tricky part. Your boot manager may be different depending on the OEM or installer.

Identify all the installation references. There should be more than one. Mine had 2.

One of these is a valid record, the other is corrupt/invalid. We need to delete the invalid record and then rewrite it.

My 2 records were {bootmgr} and {default}

I'm not sure about this, but I believe it will always be the {default} record that is corrupt. (It was for me)

So, let's assume I'm correct and the {bootmgr} record is always generic and the {default} value tends to be corrupted.

Enter the following command: bcdedit /delete {default}

The command should complete successfully.

Now that we've deleted the corrupted record, we need to allow windows to identify and rebuild the correct one.

Enter the following command: bootrec.exe /scanos

Windows should scan for any Windows installations on all drives, and it should indentify at least 1.

Choose y to add it to the boot manager.

The command should complete successfully.

Now lets clean up and make sure Windows has some defualt boot settings.

Enter the following command: bootrec.exe /fixboot

The command should complete successfully.

Enter the following command: bootrec.exe /fixmbr

The command should complete successfully.

Restart. Done! Let me know if it worked for you!

Ryan Malize

Pinellas Computers, LLC.

http://www.pinellascomputers.com