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Can't re-establish Master Boot Record on my Windows 10 Boot drive
I'm perplexed and frustrated. I have a legacy 64 bit dual core desktop (ASUS mobo). I have several Sata hard drives in it with the 4th partition of my 1 Terabyte drive containing my Windows 10 Professional boot OS. After converting another similar legacy machine to a NAS device I took the old Windows 10 32 bit OS drive from it and tried booting the ASUS machine with it. Needless to say, the OS didn't like it and reverted to Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview edition (build 11082).
Here's the kicker. When I tried to restore the boot drive to the original one for this machine the master boot was missing.
I had just formatted another partition on the same drive that had contained a Windows7 installation that had failed. This partition may have contained the master boot record. So I booted to a command prompt from a USB drive and successfully ran the following commands:
- bootrec /RebuildBcd
- bootrec /fixMbr
- bootrec /fixboot
- bootsect /nt60 SYS
- bootsect /nt60 all
After that the BIOS just says "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system"
This disk and OS are on the original machine it used to run on. As I understand it, Windows 10 tries to record it's key to somewhere in the BIOS. But the BIOS on these old machines don't provide such a facility. I don't understand what Windows 10 OS does with the key in this instance. If it was recorded in the BIOS then I'd presume that the other Windows 10 drive I attempted to use would have found it and used it. Or perhaps not, since it didn't like the new environment.
So what I'm looking for is a way to get my original Windows 10 to boot again on the same machine it had always work on before, from the 4th partition of the 1 terabyte drive I'm using. Any help is appreciated.
Last edited by Rawl214; 19 Dec 2015 at 23:52.