I have the same issue with my M6700. Did anyone solve this?

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!