Fixing Windows 7 boot problems

I was inspired to write this after spending an hour trying to get windows to boot. The problem started when i removed an IDE disk from the PC. Turns out that when i install windows on the PC with a pair of IDE and SATA disks, windows configured the IDE disk as the active partition even though i installed windows on the SATA disk. Now that the IDE disk is gone, there is no active partition. In this situation, the repair function windows boot CD will not work until an active partition is manually activated.

- Changing the active partition
Boot to repair mode on your windows CD. Under command prompt, run Diskpart
Look for the disk number with List disk
Select Disk x where x is the disk number from above
List Partition and look for the windows partition number
Select Partition x where x is the windows partition
With the active partition loaded correctly, the repair function now has the correction partition to work on.

- Restoring the boot sector on the active partition
The commandline way to rebuild the boot code.
Under Windows Vista and above, boot to repair mode on your windows CD
bootsect.exe /nt60 SYS /force where SYS refers to the system partition used to boot Windows. Replace SYS with ALL to update the boot code on all volumes that can be used as Windows boot volumes.