Reboot fails with "Invalid partition"
- by Mike Clark
My laptop can't reboot. Any time something restarts the laptop (e.g. to apply Windows updates, or Start Menu-Restart, etc), the computer sits at a black screen with the message "Invalid partition" displayed in console text. When this happens, I power off the computer, then power it back on, and it boots up fine.
OK, now the history behind this:
This laptop is a new Dell. The day I got it, I used gparted to reclaim 30 GB of disk space that had been allocated to a "recovery partition" in the middle of the laptop's primary drive. (I have DVDs for recovery and I didn't want to waste 30 GB of SSD space on recovery data.)
So I used gparted to delete the recovery partition and resize the primary Windows partition to use up the new free space. As expected when resizing a boot partition, the computer would no longer boot. I used Windows Recovery Console to fix the boot process:
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
BOOTCFG /rebuild
This worked fine and the computer boots up fine. But, as mentioned earlier, the laptop still can't reboot. Any idea on how to fix this without completely reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows from scratch?
It's Windows 7.
