Windows 7 OS repair...

D

DeathPrincess

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May 15, 2010
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I turned on the second rig yesturday and it came up with the "windows was not shutdown properly, start in safe mode" message, even though it had been. Now I know there are persons where I live that have access to that room, and who constantly turn things on by mistake and then don't know how to switch them off so just turn off the socket.
It runs off an SSD, so startup is usually 12 seconds. But it went to "preparing desktop" for around 2 minutes. When it finally got to the desktop it has the windows 95 style desktop, no icons and showed message like

"the desktop fle cannot be found, please check connections and network etc."

Nothing is clickable, and there is no mouse cursor/keyboard controls don't work.
I put the disk in and tried system restore for some reason...

Now the desktop has a background and complete icons but the mouse wont move nor keyboard commands. As soon as the power button is held down it goes to instantly the "shutting down" screen so it is not crashed.

Now I can't do an "upgrade install" because of the needing to be done while windows is running, and no controls work. The OS is on a 64GB SSD which holds that and the pagefile, the rest of the programs are on normal HDDs. Is there a way to

A) repair the OS install. I remember before on older windows OS there was a repair type command. Or I may be crazy.
B) If I do a clean install of the OS is there a simple way to retrive all the old program shortcuts/ install states?
C) Is there a way to do an upgrade install (install over old edition keeping settings) without running windows?

The installed OS is totally unresponsive to any commands, ctrl+alt+delete, windows key etc. the BIOs, running off CD works fine.
The OS is win 7 ultimate.
 
Insert Windows 7 disc, let it load. The second installer screen has the repair option in the bottom left corner.
 
Torquemada XP said:
Insert Windows 7 disc, let it load. The second installer screen has the repair option in the bottom left corner.
Click to expand...

The repair option on my disk only goes to a screen with system restore, memcheck, command line, startup repair (which doesn't work) and something else. But none of them have a repair option for the OS. Is yours different?
 
Windows 7 (and Vista, also) do not offer the same type of "repair installation" that XP/2K did, that's a thing of the past now. The one option I would suggest is booting off the DVD, getting to that second screen, choosing Repair, wait for it to find the current Windows 7 installation (if it doesn't, you're really pooched), and when it does, go to that next screen with the options you just mentioned (since you've seen them that means it does find the install, that's a good sign).

At that screen, choose the bottom option and when the Command Prompt appears, type:

sfc /scannow (and then press Enter)

It should do a complete system scan for every file related to the OS itself for corruption and problems - it won't check apps, programs, software, personal data files, none of that stuff, it's just going to check the actual OS and all related files for issues.

It'll take some time but when it's done it's either going say no problems found or that it repaired/replaced stuff along the way. Regardless, that's about as close as you're going to get to a "repair installation" of the XP/2K kind.

If if finds a ton of problems, even just one to be honest, I would next figure out what manufacturer made that hard drive in that machine (the one that's got Windows 7 on it), go to that manufacturer's website and get their hard drive diagnostic tool and then run it on that drive completely, do the quick as well as the advanced or thorough scans - yes it'll take time - and then you can rule out the hard drive going bad as the potential culprit.

Personally when I saw this posted early this morning my first instinct was and still is "Yank the drive, pull the personal data off, get ready for a clean install" since troubleshooting these kinds of "everything just broke" situations rarely leads to anything but a backup/clean install anyway which is much faster and much less troublesome.

Hopefully the SFC check (System File Checker) will find something that might be corrupt and fixing it could help, but I have serious doubts that the true "fix" for this system is going to be anywhere near that simple.

Best suggestion overall: check the drive for errors with the diagnostic software, then yank the drive, attach it to a working system, do a complete virus/malware scan BEFORE you pull data from it, and then back up whatever you can and then do a clean install.
 
Thankyou for this! I had a fun night with this...

I did the SFC command line, but it won't go past the first part because it needs to restart to complete changes. I'm guessing the system recovery, but it already did restart for that. I tried the offline command lines, but failed to make them work. (sfc /scannow /offlinedir=C:/blah blah like it suggested didn't work)
One strange thing is that the Drive letter has changed from C:/ to D:/. The drives are
C:/ SSD system.
D:/ System reserved partition on main drives
G:/ General junk files.

But now it shows as D. When I went to fresh install of winodws, C showed up. On the choose partition to repair selection screen on the repair option, it finds the OS on D and reports the size as 0kb.
Also, when I turned it on today it came up with:

"Status 0xC000000e

The Boot Selection Failed Because a Required Device Is Inaccesible"

Back on disk I tried startup repair and it threw up a 6.1.7600.16385 CorruptBootConfigData error.

So it looks like the drive is fudged. Ive pulled it from that old computer and am going to try and get some kind of software from corsair, as you advised! It has a 5 year warranty, so I should be covered.

Would there be any point in copying the reqistry over?

Thanks for your help!
 
Not really, no. Pretty sure you'll be looking at a clean fresh start here soon enough so, the old Registry won't do much good in the long run. :(
 
Its only a month old, and wasnt used for weeks because of waiting for parts, and not wanting to run with the stock HSF much. So there isn't so much "investment" in it. I'm lucky that there wasn't anything other than OS and drivers on it, which does make sense. All it really has is 50 steam games a few SDKs and the adobe creative suite. Shouldn't take too long to sort out again!
There is problems with overwriting an old install with start up times and things from what I have heard. Which I didn't notice with this one from Vista.
 
DeathPrincess said:
I turned on the second rig yesturday and it came up with the "windows was not shutdown properly, start in safe mode" message, even though it had been. Now I know there are persons where I live that have access to that room, and who constantly turn things on by mistake and then don't know how to switch them off so just turn off the socket.
It runs off an SSD, so startup is usually 12 seconds. But it went to "preparing desktop" for around 2 minutes. When it finally got to the desktop it has the windows 95 style desktop, no icons and showed message like

"the desktop fle cannot be found, please check connections and network etc."

Nothing is clickable, and there is no mouse cursor/keyboard controls don't work.
I put the disk in and tried system restore for some reason...

Now the desktop has a background and complete icons but the mouse wont move nor keyboard commands. As soon as the power button is held down it goes to instantly the "shutting down" screen so it is not crashed.

Now I can't do an "upgrade install" because of the needing to be done while windows is running, and no controls work. The OS is on a 64GB SSD which holds that and the pagefile, the rest of the programs are on normal HDDs. Is there a way to

A) repair the OS install. I remember before on older windows OS there was a repair type command. Or I may be crazy.
B) If I do a clean install of the OS is there a simple way to retrive all the old program shortcuts/ install states?
C) Is there a way to do an upgrade install (install over old edition keeping settings) without running windows?

The installed OS is totally unresponsive to any commands, ctrl+alt+delete, windows key etc. the BIOs, running off CD works fine.
The OS is win 7 ultimate.
Click to expand...

You could try a repair installation: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html


:cool:
 
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