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Anonymous
Apr 25, 2013, 6:56 PM I had the same problem on a Dell Precision newish - M6500 that I had recently used an external USB HDD for doing a backup.
The EXACT error text is "Invalid Partition Table!" - and I didn't have any option to press enter, as far as I know, but... hey, I was kinda freaking out a bit. So if magically ENTER would have done something, I don't know. But I powered off (Ctrl+Alt+Del also worked to reboot) then entered BIOS mode to perform the fix bellow.
I fixed the problem as follows:
Turned off the laptop
Unplugged the External USB HDD (and all other USB devices probably not necessary, but didn't know at the time)
Made sure ALL media bays (SD Card reader and DVD drive) were empty
Went into the BIOS config on boot up, and configured the boot sequence to leave off everything except Internal HDD, and CD/DVD (so turned off the USB and secondary HDD from the boot sequence)
Rebooted - and windows resumed without any error message.
Needless to say, that was a HUGE relief. These posts here are old, so probably the posters have already figured out a solution, or moved on - but in case someone else runs in to this problem, this solution was a non-destructive thing. Before trying the windows startup repair, try this first... I have an SSD drive for Drive 0, a SATA for Drive 1, and have a Seagate 1.5TB external USB 3 HDD.
Hi TimKause,
- What is the exact error message that you get?
- Were you able to boot up to the desktop?
- Did you make any changes to the computer recently?
I would suggest you to perform startup repair from the following link:
Startup Repairhttp://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/startup-repair