Invalid partition table!

I thought about this too- the M4700 has 2 drives, big ol sata drive, and then 128GB SSD.  But in bios it's clearly booting of the correct one first (the SSD).  

Is there something in BIOS where on boot the machine checks for that recovery partition and is puking with 'invalid partition' if it can't find it?

Check the boot sequence for another drive?

OK, this is what worked for me - Adding  to the answer by CarabouSpider. first, go to the bios by hitting F2, go to boot sequence, uncheck the 'Internal HDD'. Save and  reboot. done. Keep in mind that this works if you have the boot drive as the 'MiniCard SSD', which in most cases is what people will have since it is a SSD boot device.

With my M6700 I can solve the problem by having the hard drive first in boot sequence and the SSD second.

The other way round the message appears.

Drawback: You can´t have a second operating system on the hard drive for fallback purposes.

Hi, in my case (Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M4700 Laptop) in the BIOS I had to totally switch to the UEFI boot mode. 

In the UEFI boot I've add a new UEFI device (something like GPT disk),I choosed a name MSata_SSD, and I've boot from this device.

After a day failure finally tt boots.

The affected devices: 60GB kingston Msata ssd, 1TB western digital 5400rpm.

This method totally worked for Precision M4800 (when doing a new Windows 7 OS install from a disc).

1. Go to Bios Setup (F2 during laptop boot-up)

2. Under General -> Boot Sequence, make sure Internal HDD and MiniCard SSD are checked.

3. On the right-side boot order, Internal HDD has to be above MiniCard SSD.

It looks like Windows 7 installs the System Reserve partition in the HDD (Disk 0, Active Partition), which probably includes the boot manager, even though the Windows system files are in the SSD (Disk 1).

Posting this here since I found this thread when I had a similar problem. Stepped away from my running M6800 and came back to the "Invalid partition table!" message.

Hardware diagnostics ran successfully. I found an old Win7 install disc - did not use the USB drive I had prepared when I got the computer, as it just told me that startup could not be repaired and would have to proceed with re-image. Anyway, DISKPART showed that the miniSSD drive had no partitions - YIKES!

Was able to use the Ultimate Boot CD and its included TestDisk utility to analyse the disk and re-write a new partition table. My miniSSD had 3 partitions on it, one small utility partition (40 MB) one larger recovery partition (12 GB) and the primary partition (226 GB). I set the primary partition to bootable in the TestDisk utility and rebooted.

Now I got a different error - "no bootable operating systems found" so at least the disk was behaving properly. I used the Win7 CD again along with the information in this article from Microsoft to rebuild the boot record. Now at least my Windows installation would show up in the list when you go to Repair from the Win7 setup menu. I rebooted into the Win7 repair menu again and it said something to the effect of "we found errors in the startup information and corrected them, please reboot" so I did, and voila, booted right into Windows.

Dell's answer was to reformat and reinstall - glad I didn't have to do that.

Some other links that might be helpful:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

All I did was go into bios and keep legacy. I checked all of the devices on boot sequence and changed the order to internal HDD on top. I hit apply and exit. No more problem!

My Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M4700 Laptop with a 1TB 850 SSD-0, 500 GB 850 SSD M-SATA-1, 1TB 5400 HDD-2, has been running Windows 10 flawlessly for 11 months. After some houscleaning it started to display the "nvalid Boot Partition" message on startup but if I hit any key it boots fine, but it didn't do this before, I want to fix it. The problem still persists at this point. the M-SATA is my Disc Image repository for my Clonezilla BU schedule, the 1TB HDD is a file BU slave only that I have Win 10 File History doing hourly copies of most of my important working folders. It's a bit cumbersome as you have to exclude folders rather than include folders and sub folders in the backup to get what you want and not more, as I found out later, but it is automatic and thoughtless. I have other file backups from other sources going to that drive as well.

The 1TB Hdd was getting too full for the happyness of File History so I learned more about it and changed some of the settings so it was happy about 5 months ago.

As you can tell my BU scheme is a bit redundant but......

I think the problem came about after the latest "House Cleaning" when I noticed File History was copying a number of folders I just don't need to. I wanted to start over.

This is the order I did things before the problem came about and the steps taken thus far to correct it. Between most steps the computer was shut off and cold booted.

First I deleted the "user" folder from the File History folder on the HDD. and reset the parameters of File history to hopefully only get the folders I wanted in that backup. At this point File History didn't recognize the HDD as a valid disc. I restarted File History and it said it found some files to add to the backup and asked if I wanted to add them Yes-No, I chose yes 3 times, deleting the File History folder in this sequence as it saw the HDD. but wouldn't allow me to use it. I reinstalled the latest Bios file with No help from that.

I transfered all the other files to a temporary folder on the Primary 1TB SSD and formated the HDD, put all the files back on the HDD except File History, Still had the issue,

This time I restarted File History and said No to adding the temporary files it found. This time it allowed me to use the HDD as the File History Target disc with my new Excluded Folders parameters. At this point the Invalid Partition Table message still comes up at boot and pressing any key alows the boot to continue.

I could just reimage the primary SSD with my backup image from about a week ago but a few key things have changed like Dropbox and some other files that I won't even know till I reimage it. I think I can find a solution without a reimage. Also I believe it has to do with File History and the HDD so I will continue with Boot Order and such before I  loose whatever I've done in a week.

********Update*******

I started the computer in BIOS, went to Boot Order and unchecked items that I would never boot from leaving 3 items ithat I put in this order.

USB

CD/DVD

Primary SSD (OS Drive)

That fixed the problem. Not sure how it would have changed as the last time I made a change to the boot order was to boot from a bootable USB with Clonezilla Live. There has been no peoblem for 11 months or more.

Hope this helps someone else out there.