windows-7-enterprise

So after waiting for several months for a more powerful laptop, the company finally gives me one. Although it has no touch screen, a lousy 2 hr battery time and weighs a ton, its an improvement over my existing one. I ask the microsoft experts to setup 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise so I can run my 64-bit vm’s on it. After a day and half of setting up windows I’m excited to see what this pupy can do. It works fine for 3 hours till I leave the office. Once I’m home, I decide to finish all my pending tasks and connect to the office. But the laptop refuses to boot up!!! Damn windows!!! It just gives me a “BOOTMGR failed to Load” error all the time.

Next day I find out that we don’t have the bootable DVD’s for Windows 7. Why? Seems volume licensing is only for upgrades!!! Then, how was it installed? Seems it took a day and half to install caz they did it off some network share. So what do we do now? Can we get a DVD? After searching for ages on the Microsoft site, we find the Windows 7 Enterprise DVD hidden at the bottom of the downloads page. But the damn thing won’t download. Aaaargh!!!

Ok, now its another day and half and my laptop is still not up and running! I start checking on the net and this seems to be a pretty common problem. Time to take things into my own hands. After some digging around, I decide to make a bootable Windows 7 Enterprise installation USB disk. The reason is that the tool that fixes the BOOTMGR error lies on that installation disk. A fairly simple process actually!!!

All you need is

  1. 4GB USB stick
  2. Any bootable Windows 7 or Vista DVD (XP may work too)
  3. A dump of the correct Windows 7 installation disk
  4. Access to another computer with Windows 7 or Vista

Step 1: Format your USB disk.

Open a command prompt as an administrator and type in “diskpart”.

Then type in “list disk”. This will display a list of all drive. Take note of your USB drive number. Then type the following:

select disk 1 (assuming 1 is your disk number)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS (this could take some time)
assign
exit

Step 2: Make it bootable

Put a bootable Windows 7 or Vista DVD into the disk drive and change to the “boot” folder. Then type in “bootsect /nt60 h:” (assuming h: is the drive letter of your usb disk)

Step 3: Copy the required installation files to the usb drive.

That’s all! Now reboot your machine and make sure it boots from usb. Once it boots, click “Next” and then select the “Repair your Computer” option at the bottom. Select your installation, then hit “next”. Then select “Startup repair”.

This worked immediately for me and the laptop is finally up and running. I gotta lot of work to catch up with now!