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I have a mid-2009 MBP. A couple of years ago I swapped out the optical drive for an SSD, made the original hard drive a Boot Camp partition and installed Windows 7 on it. It has been a brilliant "best of both worlds" solution as I happen to be a Windows/.Net applications developer.

A few days ago Windows 7 started refusing to boot, amid the rising panic I ran disk utility on both drives all partitions. Apart from permissions that needed correcting all seems fine. I can browse the drive inside of OS X (although permissions set-up prevents me from writing to it) and no errors are reported.

It would seem that the master boot record is corrupt on the Windows drive, ordinarily I would just boot from the Windows installer CD and fix it but as I no longer have a DVD drive directly attached Windows on Boot Camp won't boot from it (the Mac doesn't seem to want to do a Boot Camp boot off a USB drive).

Is there another way I can fix this without having to reformat and re-install windows on the Boot Camp drive? I have projects due in in a few days and don't have the time to set-up a new Windows install and development environment.

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  • Please define "refusing to boot", what error do you get? – Rob Apr 5 '14 at 12:10
  • Trying a regular boot just leads to a blank white screen, doesn't get as far as the Windows bootloader (which has a black screen). If i try opening the partition in Parallels it says something like 'No bootable drives found'. – 5arx Apr 5 '14 at 13:42
  • I could swear I've been able to boot off Windows installer via USB on my Mac before. Are you holding the option key down when you boot to get to the startup manager? – Fyrefly Jul 15 '14 at 14:55
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I'm very excited that to say that booting Windows fixed itself. My machine: MBP 2010. OSX Fuse installed. Recent update on one OSX partition to Mavericks.

My machine automatically ran its CHKDSK function and restored its own ability to boot. It found orphaned files and repaired the links. If you can figure out how to force CHKDSK to start you may find everything fixed. Best of luck!

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