Deleted my page file

[Chan-man]

Ok so I did something crazy. I have a 120GB SSD in my computer and it was getting full so I went by some forums online and changed my paging file to another drive. It completely worked fine but after about a month or so I noticed nothing was being saved to that partition on the other drive due to me having about 16GB of ram in my computer. I just figured it wasn't needed. So I deleted the partition without even thinking I had to go back and change the setting for the page file. Now i'm faced this morning after shutting it down with a blinking cursor on the screen. What do I do?

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit and no I havn't done a backup yet. It was honestly on my to do list for today.

 

[getochkn]

A blinking cursor usually means the drive can't find anything to boot and has nothing to do with the page file. If you're comfortable, try going into the BIOS and see if the HD is detected for starters.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Start your computer in safe mode and change pagefile location back to c:
You can enter Safe mode by pressing F8 (may need to press multiple times), when computer is booting up.

But that will not work if you have accidentaly deleted your bootloader partition.

 

[Chan-man]

A blinking cursor usually means the drive can't find anything to boot and has nothing to do with the page file. If you're comfortable, try going into the BIOS and see if the HD is detected for starters.

I'm actually a computer technician part time. So I know my way around computers very easily but this one had me kinda stumped. This is aslo a custom build.

 

[Chan-man]

Start your computer in safe mode and change pagefile location back to c:
You can enter Safe mode by pressing F8 (may need to press multiple times), when computer is booting up.

But that will not work if you have accidentaly deleted your bootloader partition.

F8 won't work I had already tried that. I did also delete an "EFI" partition on another drive but I thought it didn't go with my system drive cause it was on a completely different drive and I figured it was from another system since it was from an old computer. It was on one of y extra drives that was empty. I use the extra drive for extra storage

 

[SkyNetRising]

Ok then. You have to recreate your bootloader partition.

If you say, you're computer technican, you should have no problems restoring your computer back to life.

 

[nukemaster]

Windows has a bad habit of installing its boot partition(system reserved or efi) on other drives.

If you took that out, you are going to have to attempt to recover. You may be able to install the drive in another system and use something like EasyBCD to deploy a new boot loader.
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

You can even deploy on your c:, but will have to open and edit that boot loader after since easyBCD loads the systems default on and the new one will be on the old c :

In the end I think it has nothing to do with the page file and everything to do with a missing boot loader.

 

[Chan-man]

Ok then. You have to recreate your bootloader partition.

If you say, you're computer technican, you should have no problems restoring your computer back to life.

I said I'm a part time one. I'm a full time cellphone technician. I work on computers in my shop on the side and am still in the learning stages.

 

[Chan-man]

Windows has a bad habit of installing its boot partition(system reserved or efi) on other drives.

If you took that out, you are going to have to attempt to recover. You may be able to install the drive in another system and use something like EasyBCD to deploy a new boot loader.
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

You can even deploy on your c:, but will have to open and edit that boot loader after since easyBCD loads the systems default on and the new one will be on the old c :

In the end I think it has nothing to do with the page file and everything to do with a missing boot loader.

I deleted the that partition with Mini Tool Partition wizard and then closed down the system. I happen to have a boot disk for mini tool partition wizard should i try a recovery first with that?

 

[nukemaster]

It can not hurt to try to recover it.

If you do get it working you may want to attempt to get that partition on the SSD.

SSD garbage recovery makes partition recovery harder. With hard drives it tends to be more easy(data is just marked as free, but files are not removed, they later get over written).

You can even use a flash drive as a boot loader.

 

[Chan-man]

It can not hurt to try to recover it.

If you do get it working you may want to attempt to get that partition on the SSD.

SSD garbage recovery makes partition recovery harder. With hard drives it tends to be more easy(data is just marked as free, but files are not removed, they later get over written).

You can even use a flash drive as a boot loader.

I'm doing a full sector scan right now and it's already listing 3 Partitions labeled "boot" as "lost/deleted". It also lists the starting LBA and ending LBA. I know my partition was et the very first part of that drive and it was small. These bot partitions its finding are all 3.01MB.

 

[nukemaster]

Boot partitions tend to be larger 100 or more megabytes.

Do you have another computer to attempt repairs on?

 

[Chan-man]

Boot partitions tend to be larger 100 or more megabytes.

Do you have another computer to attempt repairs on?

mac mini 2011 or a surface pro 3

 

[nukemaster]

Nothing with easy to use external sata ports and power.

Do you have a test bench at work? That may be a good place to work on it.

If you check out your Surface Pro's disk management you will see how the boot partition is normally set up in most cases.

This is a Windows 7 example on a non uefi system

 

[Chan-man]

Nothing with easy to use external sata ports and power.

Do you have a test bench at work? That may be a good place to work on it.

If you check out your Surface Pro's disk management you will see how the boot partition is normally set up in most cases.

This is a Windows 7 example on a non uefi system

Also i just found my original Disk i used for the clean install. When I boot it it and click "repair computer" It pops up saying it's incompatible.

 

[nukemaster]

If the boot manager is missing it may do strange things.

When I installed a Windows 8 beta it changed the Windows 7 boot loader in such a way that repair would not work either. Lucky for me, I have not had to use it.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Computer technican should be able to do this with no problems,
but anyway - here is list of actions needed to recreate boot partition:

1. Shutdown the PC and disconnect all other drives leaving only SSD and optical drive.
2. Reboot from Win7 installation media.
3. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt
4. Using diskpart utility, do:
a) Shrink windows partition on SSD by 200MB
b) create new primary partition in freed up space (NTFS formated)
c) make new partition active
5. Restart and boot with Win7 installation media second time
6. Get into System recovery options / Startup repair
7. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt and execute commands:
a) bootrec /fixmbr
b) bootrec /fixboot
c) bootrec /scanos
b) bootrec /rebuildbcd
8. Shutdown the PC, reconnect all drives
9. Reboot, enter BIOS and make sure that SSD is first in boot order.
10. Reboot last time and you're done.

 

[Chan-man]

Computer technican should be able to do this with no problems,
but anyway - here is list of actions needed to recreate boot partition:

1. Shutdown the PC and disconnect all other drives leaving only SSD and optical drive.
2. Reboot from Win7 installation media.
3. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt
4. Using diskpart utility, do:
a) Shrink windows partition on SSD by 200MB
b) create new primary partition in freed up space (NTFS formated)
c) make new partition active
5. Restart and boot with Win7 installation media second time
6. Get into System recovery options / Startup repair
7. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt and execute commands:
a) bootrec /fixmbr
b) bootrec /fixboot
c) bootrec /scanos
b) bootrec /rebuildbcd
8. Shutdown the PC, reconnect all drives
9. Reboot, enter BIOS and make sure that SSD is first in boot order.
10. Reboot last time and you're done.

If you would have read the entire thread you'd have seen i'm part time and still learning.

I've already unhooked all sata cables from all the drives excluding my optical and SSD. No matter what i do whenever I boot into the Disk and Click "Repair your Computer" it always says

"This version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair. Try using a recovery disk that is compatible with this version of windows."

I'm not running any type of RAID either.

I've tried booting Win 7 Ultimate 32 from a ISO Online and i've also tried booting from the original 32 and 64 Bit MS Original CDs I used to install This OS.

 

[Chan-man]

I did finally get it to boot. I thought I had tried this earlier but I guess it was with the drives connected. I had to boot the CD in UEFI not the regular way.

 

[nukemaster]

Edit. Looks like you had some progress

Did you try the 10 steps listed? I see no reason not to try it.

You do not even need a second computer to do this.

With another computer one could just use 3rd party software to create a new boot partition(or deploy a boot loader on the Windows partition).

 

[Chan-man]

Edit. Looks like you had some progress

Did you try the 10 steps listed? I see no reason not to try it.

You do not even need a second computer to do this.

With another computer one could just use 3rd party software to create a new boot partition(or deploy a boot loader on the Windows partition).

I am trying the 10 steps as we speak. I couldn't try them earlier because I could not get into the recovery environment.

 

[Chan-man]

Computer technican should be able to do this with no problems,
but anyway - here is list of actions needed to recreate boot partition:

1. Shutdown the PC and disconnect all other drives leaving only SSD and optical drive.
2. Reboot from Win7 installation media.
3. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt
4. Using diskpart utility, do:
a) Shrink windows partition on SSD by 200MB
b) create new primary partition in freed up space (NTFS formated)
c) make new partition active
5. Restart and boot with Win7 installation media second time
6. Get into System recovery options / Startup repair
7. Get into System recovery options / Command Prompt and execute commands:
a) bootrec /fixmbr
b) bootrec /fixboot
c) bootrec /scanos
b) bootrec /rebuildbcd
8. Shutdown the PC, reconnect all drives
9. Reboot, enter BIOS and make sure that SSD is first in boot order.
10. Reboot last time and you're done.

On 4-c I can't make it active because i'm running on a GPT drive. What do I do at that point?

 

[Chan-man]

Edit. Looks like you had some progress

Did you try the 10 steps listed? I see no reason not to try it.

You do not even need a second computer to do this.

With another computer one could just use 3rd party software to create a new boot partition(or deploy a boot loader on the Windows partition).

I actually took the SSD to my bench computer and used disk Management to add the partition but as i said earlier I can't set it as active because it's a GPT disk. The reason it is set to GPT is because on the clean install it wouldn't allow the MBR way. I have now used the Command Prompt to do what @SkyNetRising said to do but when i get to "bootrec /rebuildBCD" it doesn't work.

This is what happens:

X:\Sources>bootrec /rebuildbcd
Scanning all disks for Windows Installations...

Please wait, since this may take a while...

Successfully scanned Windows installations.
Total identified Windows installations: 1
[1] C:\Windows
Add installation to boot list? Yes<Y>/No<N>/All<A>:Y
The requested system device cannot be found.


What does that mean?

 

[nukemaster]

Did you have just the ssd on the bench system?

I do not have a GPT windows drive kicking around. The system partition is a FAT32 partition, maybe this is a part of it.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825686.aspx

 

[SkyNetRising]

On GPT disks substitute 4.b) Create new partition EFI
4.c) is not necessary (or possible) on GPT disks

EFI partition should be the first partition on the disk.
I'm not sure it will work properly if EFI is at the end of the disk. But try it anyway before you start moving partitions around.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744301%28v=ws.10%29.aspx