Windows 7 Installation Mess up.

Nobi125

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2005
Messages
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I was installing Windows 7 on a new drive an accidentally had it copy files to my main drive that already had a Windows 7 installation on it. Now whenever I boot that main drive it thinks there are two installations on there, the second one is non functional.

How can I fix this? I want to get rid of the extra Windows files that were copied on there.
 
i don't know how to get rid of the actualy windows files, but you can edit the boot menu with EasyBCD.
 
i don't know how to get rid of the actualy windows files, but you can edit the boot menu with EasyBCD.

Tried that just now, the problem is that it just lists two boot options that are both just called "Windows 7." How am I supposed to know which is the correct one to get rid of?
 
Here' what it's showing me:

a3plxw.jpg



Which one is the one I need to get rid of?
 
Tried that just now, the problem is that it just lists two boot options that are both just called "Windows 7." How am I supposed to know which is the correct one to get rid of?

Simple, the order on the items in EasyBCD is the same as on the boot menu. So if the first item on the boot menu is the one that boots, then you want to keep the first item in EasyBCD and delete the second. Hope that makes sense.
 
Simple, the order on the items in EasyBCD is the same as on the boot menu. So if the first item on the boot menu is the one that boots, then you want to keep the first item in EasyBCD and delete the second. Hope that makes sense.

Gotcha, lemme reboot and figure out which one it is.

Any idea on how to get rid of the files that were copied over, where are they even stored? Possibly somewhere on that system partition?
 
This is a gamble, but it should be the second one down on the section where you can add or remove boot entries. Same thing was showing on a friend's computer but with Windows XP and I deleted the second one down and it worked fine.

EDIT: What Heatless said, thanks for confirming.
 
Really, really bad news.

It was the first one that I had to get rid of, but I hit the save button twice and now they are both gone.

I'm so frustrated right now. What's my next move?
 
I've had to do five Windows 7 installations on different PCs and haven't had a single issue until now. I can't believe I made this mistake.

Boot related stuff is a not one of my better areas.
 
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Tried creating a new boot file with that program, it doesn't work.

I had set the boot selection time to zero seconds, and now it just boots to the system recovery options. Any way to change the selection time without being able to get into windows??

I tried doing a system restore to yesterday from the recovery options, that did nothing.

I think I'm just screwed.
 
Does Windows 7 have a repair windows option when you run the installation off the disk?
 
Does Windows 7 have a repair windows option when you run the installation off the disk?

It does, but the tools in there aren't very helpful. It doesn't have a recovery console, it has a command prompt and none of the recovery console commands that I'm familiar with work there.

I'm gonna go nuts if I have to do another fresh Windows installation this week.
 
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Possible to repair my boot setup on my main windows installation on one drive while I'm booted into another installation on a second drive?

Is there any sort of boot.ini type file that I can open up and edit?

I need a way to exit the OS selection time.
 
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I seemed to have most of it fixed. All of this BCD crap is a nightmare to work with. Give me back my boot.ini.

The only problem I'm having now is that when it boots, it goes to the OS selection screen and displays the one correct option. How can I make it just boot into Windows 7 automatically like it used to. I don't want it to go to the selection screen at all.
 
Glad to hear, sorry if my instructions didn't work for you. I've done this a couple of time with EasyBCD with multiple Windows 7 partitions and the procedure I described work fine.
 
Glad to hear, sorry if my instructions didn't work for you. I've done this a couple of time with EasyBCD with multiple Windows 7 partitions and the procedure I described work fine.

Wasn't your fault, I think it was mostly me knowing nothing about BCD and Vista/W7 boot configuration.

I'm still puzzled as to how EasyBCD wiped both of my Windows 7 boot options after I only deleted one.

Basically, I ended up fixing it by using the command prompt to edit the BCD and fix the timeout, which was set to zero. Then that allowed me to get back into the Windows 7 boot configuration that I had fixed through the boot repair configuration. I had gone through the command prompt and had it fix the MBR and Fixboot and even rebuilt the BCD multiple times, but NONE of these will reset the timeout for some bizarre reason. It had been repeatedly booting into the recovery console since it didn't give me a chance to select anything else.
 
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