Operating system not found

I have a machine with Win7/64-bit. I made a VMWare disk from this machine, installed VMWare 7 and made a new virtual machine. When I try to boot this machine it says 'Operating system not found'.
I then booted the VM from the Paragon CD, the disk is there, all the files seem to be present but I can't boot.

Can anyone help?

 

Hello,

There are a few things that could have gone wrong, however most likely the problem is with the MBR, or boot critical files, you can update the MBR from the Paragon recovery CD. If that does not get the system booting, I recommend running the windows 7 start up repair from the install CD, if this is not available, a recovery CD is available at http://neosmart.net/

The start up repair from these disks will rebuild the MBR and replace any boot files that may not have been copied. This could have been caused by your system configuration, do you have any other OS's or hard disks on your system?

 

I tried all your suggestions but in the end it turned out that Win 7 is booting from a small partition (about 200MB) and then somehow switches over to the real partition. So I converted this small partition to a VM disk and booted from there and all was fine.
Thanks for your help