I have a Sony Vaio E series laptop. The laptop came out with Windows 7 installed and only one partition. Recently I used partition magic to make two more partitions and most probably made a mess of it. In the next boot my laptop says MBR not found. Any idea how to fix this?
Most likely is the MBR got corrupted while you re-partitioned your drive. It can happen if partitioning is not done without care. You should have first shrunk the drive using windows disk management and then played with the freed up space.
Anyway at this point the option is to reinstall windows. You could use a live disk (Linux one) to recover the files you don't want to be deleted and then go on with the installation.
I didn't create the recovery disk. My laptop came out with original windows and I was prompted several times to create recovery disk which I didn't do this time. Is there any way to recover windows and create those disks and then reformat?
Yes! But would be a painful process and not guaranteed to work either. It's best to reformat. As far as I know if the VAIO came out with original windows it should have a hidden recovery partition. I'll check and let you know!
Press F10 when the VAIO logo shows up and then the recovery (re-install actually) process will start.
Didn't know about the F10 function. Thanks a lot!!
Sorry! But destroying the partition table leaves us no choice but to re-install everything. Always keep backups of your files because you never know what might happen. Relying entirely on the recovery system is not a good idea either as it's useless in case of hdd failure. So it's best to make external backups (and/or stop using windows). Happy fixing!
