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I am using Windows Home Server to backup my PCs. I recently had a hard drive failure on one of my WHS connected PCs and obtained an identical sized/speed drive for my laptop.

I used the latest home server restore CD and did the restore. It said it completed successfully. Upon reboot, it says 'cannot find boot device' and lists all my drives (hard drive, cd, network book) indicating no valid operating system was found.

I boot using the Win7 repair disk and while it doesn't see the operating system, it sees the drive and if I go into a command prompt, I can see all my data on the drive.

My laptop is Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate. I've tried most everything I can think of. I'm a technical user (software developer) so I'm pretty aware of how things work (or should). I don't feel like I'm missing a simple step here.

Tim Heuer
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I ran into this issue and it was because I needed to not only restore the C: drive, but also the 100 MB system partition that Windows 7 creates. I'm no expert on the internals of Win7, but I'm assuming the boot partition is actually that 100 MB system partition and not the C: drive partition. I had the exact same symptoms as you (successfully restore, cannot find boot device message, and Win7 repair not seeing the operating system) and once I restored both the 100MB partition and the C: drive it booted up correctly.

ctrlalt313373
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Hope, it's not yet late for some advices regarding Windows 7 restore on your laptop from WHS backup. I believe, David is right saying, that active bood partition was not restored. First of all, if you have a second PC, that is connected to your WHS, through the WHS Console check in "Computers & Backup" if the backup for your laptop contains this small partition: double click on tha backup set you were using for restore and "Volumes in Backup" should contain (System Reserved) for 100MB, C: and other volumes (if you had any). If (System Reserved) is there and status is "Complete", than should be any problems to restore your laptop.

Have a look at this detailed description how to restore it: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979499&sd=rss&spid=12624

If a status for your small boot partition is "Failed" and/or it's appears as (Local Disk) not (System Reserved), or there is no such partition in your Backup list, then I would suggest to run installation of Windows 7 on your laptop (blank spare hard drive?). After installation (it creates missing boot partition) try to restore volume C: from your WHS backup, but I cannot be sure, such trick will work :(

Victor Dubina
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I had the same problem restoring my Windows 7 64bits laptop using the Windows Home Server restore option, and solved it by booting on the Windows 7 repair disc.

Choose the repair option and in the command prompt type :

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildBCD
j0k
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YanSolo
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