Windows 7: WIN7 won't boot. What should I do before trying a clean install?

My Win 7 64 SP1 installation on my wife's PC has died.
It just won't boot up any more.
I have tried to do a repair "startup repair" but it cannot correct the error and doesn't give any useful information.

This is an OEM installation so I don't appear to have any other repair options from the Win DVD.

I am quite happy to do a clean install but I'm not sure if I have any other options I should try first and I'm not sure if I should try and recover any drivers etc from the system before I do the new install. (As the PC doesn't boot up on these disks I'm not even sure how to recover any files from them).

Ian

Go through this tutorial : Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

I'm working my way through this. Windows defender has finished and found nothing.

I have rebooted unsuccessfully and have run Startup Repair for the first time. I took the opportunity to check the C: drive for the windows defender log.

The CMD window came up on the X: drive and I can do a dir of my E: drive successfully, however the dir of the C: drive comes up as "file Not Found" and no directories or files are listed.

Is that normal at this stage - to not be able to see the C: drive?

The C: and E: drives are separate physical drives.

Ian

Hello Yan, any more progress ?
That's good. I guess C is the system drive and E is for data storage ?

If so, remove the E drive, disconnect the sata and power. Now, Follow the tutorial Partition - Mark as Active (either method 2 or method 3) to mark the hidden 100 mb system reserved partition as active, and then run Startup Repair for three separate times, with restarts after every single run.

Report the results back.

Not quite. I think that the C: drive is the system drive but I'm pretty sure the other disk is partitioned into E: and F: with the windows directory is on E: that's what shows up in the repair tool. Then the two program files directories and all the user data are on F:

I will give removing the E: drive a go and see what happens although if I'm right that won't get me very far.

In the mean time I finished running the original set of Startup Repairs with no success and then ran the bootrec.exe tool.

Not sure what I should have seen but
/FixMbr responded immediately with one line "The operation completed successfully"
/FixBoot the same
/ScanOs responded
- total identified windows installations: 0
/RebbuildBCD - also responded - total identified windows installations: 0

If E is the drive with windows directory, dont remove that hdd. What is there in the C drive ?

I decided to be cautious and just ran disk part to see what was there.
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

Do you still want me to pull out the 2nd disk?

Ian

I Don't know. If I try to do a directory all I get is "File not found"

I had a look at all the drives I could find using the Dir command:

C: File not found
D: 500GB various files and the user files directories
E: looks like the windows directory.
F: the program files directories
G: looks like backups
H: DVD

Apparently let us go for a try.

Remove disk 1.

Mark disk 0 partition 1 as active, and then run Startup Repair . The disk sizes say that the disk 0 should contain the windows installation.

If failed, we may try with the other one.

EDIT : Overlook this post.