WIN7 won't boot. What should I do before trying a clean install?

presumably after the 3rd startup repair I reboot as normal and see what happens?

Oh OK.

Do I have to do anything to the first partition I marked as active?

ibex said:

Disk 0 online 74GB
Disk 1 online 1397GB

Select Disk 0
List partition
Partition 1 primary 100MB 1024KB
Partition 2 primary 74GB 101MB

Select disk 1
List partition
Partition 1 Primary 500GB 1024KB
partition 2 Primary 500GB 500GB
Partition 3 primary 397GB 1000GB

How do I know which of the three partitions on the 2nd disk is the E: drive?
Do I just assume the first one?

Arc said:

Is it is listed as C, D, E, F, and G , strange, but disk 1 partition 1 should be the E .

Did you have dual boot setup anytime ?

No - this has only ever been a single boot WIN7 PC.

When I had removed disk 1 and was just using Disk 0 it reported that Win7 was on the 76GB D: drive.

I have put disk 1 back in and marked partition 1 as active and run the startup repair three times now with a reboot after the first two.

Each time it says that it is looking at the Win7 on the 76GB partition (E:)
and each time it says that "Startup Repair could not detect a problem."

So then I rebooted from the disk and BSOD Process 1 initialization failed.

Arc said:

ibex said:

When I had removed disk 1 and was just using Disk 0 it reported that Win7 was on the 76GB D: drive.

That should be the right situation. But the drive letters are all messed up there . Assuming it, I posted this one WIN7 won't boot. What should I do before trying a clean install? , but later confused seeing your response :)

ibex said:

I have put disk 1 back in and marked partition 1 as active and run the startup repair three times now with a reboot after the first two.

Each time it says that it is looking at the Win7 on the 76GB partition (E:)
and each time it says that "Startup Repair could not detect a problem."

So then I rebooted from the disk and BSOD Process 1 initialization failed.

As the situation is, my previous assumption was right, as I think. You mark the 100 mb partion of disk 0 active again, and try startup repair. it should work now.

To check the disk layout I went to the custom install options because this lays out all the partitions.
size free
Disk 0 Part 1 100.0 MB 70.0 MB System
Disk 0 Part 2 74.4 GB 5.5 GB Primary

Disk 1 Partition1: UserData 500.0 GB 466.0 GB System
Disk 1 Partition2: ProgFiles 500.0 GB 409.8 GB Primary
Disk 1 Partition3: Backup 397.3 GB 21.1 GB Primary

There are now 2 System partitions. I presume I need to change that?

and when I do a Dir of each drive I have found that
C: nothing found and no size info
D: 500GB free
E: 5GB free
F: 440GB free
G: 22GB free

So E: = Disk 0 part 2
D: = Disk 1 part 1
F: = Disk 1 part 2
G: = Disk 1 part 3

Early start at work tomorrow so I'm off for a while now.