It's the main Bios boot order/settings that I'd concentrate on, once they're working correctly, then the Esc. boot menu should also work as expected.
Simple is better: with W7 you can create your System drives with only one partition, just as you can a Data/storage drive, that way the 'route' from the Bios > MBR > Active partition is cleaner, no 'hidden' or System/Windows partition to find because it's the same as the Active partition. It's probably easier to do that from scratch, after creating a single, full drive partition either with Windows Disk Management as a slave, or from the Advanced setup when booting from the W7 DVD/USB with only the target drive installed.
(My screenshot shows spare areas on all three of my SSDs, that was done after booting into Windows after the intial setup, all three drives had in turn once been the main Windows drive with full status flags as does the C: still.)