Disaster after removing dual boot Win 8 with Win 7, Cant fix laptop..

tarheeljudd · 23 Jun 2012

Okay, I'm sure many of you techies get a laugh as you read this but I was eager to try Win 8. And after a few week I realized the it was just slowing my performance some so I just decided to unistall it. Was immeaditely faced with a BSOD on next reboot and have repairing and re-installing since to keep it running. I noticed I have about 10 to 12 accounts under with the same name, shared in users, workgroup, etc.. in each of the three OS that I have comepletely "cleaned" "wiped" and "formatted" by Windows 7 and Paragon 2010. Throughout the day the pc will hang and cut off and when I use a repair disc to boot it back up, it recovers one of the three OS's...2 Ultimate x64 and 1 Pro x64 .. I shouldn't have did all the "clean all" commands I guess but that's how I "thought" it'd be best to try to completely wipe my drive and clean install after the boot partition or MBR was altered by Win 8 being removed. Now after trying everything to get rid of the recovery partition, they've got two of them now for 208mb! I noticed "virus" written out really big on the table where the binary is, near the MBR... but I ran Avast, Malwarebytes, and another notable av..and I'm sure it's not there now after wiping, formatting and the multiple "clean all" elevated cmds I did. Any ideas on what to do next? I included a sfc /scannow and will submit anything else you like. It just keeps giving same error code of 0x0000000064 and running SLOW as well as inconsisent with power..Oh I will attach a spec sheet also... THANKs a lot for any help, I have class online starting back in a month.

Night Hawk · 24 Jun 2012

Before removing 8 since you seem to be tied to a single boot drive seeing the one of the other Windows installs set as the default would have been all that was needed before wiping the drive. The finding here with a 7/8 dual boot with each starting off as stand alone installs and later a Refresh PC of 8 automatically adding 7 in resulted in drive errors!

Keeping the 8 Release Preview install totally separate from any other version as far as boot loaders is the actual best move. One question here however is how many drives are actually in use for Vista, 7, and 8 now gone?

For the next clean installs of each other version Vista and 7, one each advised, the clean all command succeeded in nuking the one or more drive(s) involved. With the 64bit Vista however trying to reinstall that version's 64bit flavor requires removing all but 2gb of memory to avoid installation errors. That could be part of the problem you are running into.

The 100+mb partitions wouldn't be recovery but boot file and boot configuration System Reserved partitions the Windows 7 or 8 installer. As far as creating a new primary you could easily seen that done while you had the command prompt option for Disk Part once you had entered the clean all command to see a fresh primary on the one or more OS drives.

As for the virus that could be the result of either a corrupted Partition Table or a rootkit. With everything being wiped clean anything seen now like that would be a need for a new PT to work with.

Besides drive errors you could be looking at a hardware issue as far as bad sectors where a hard drive diagnostics tool could reveal that. With a look at the memory dump from the BSOD you experienced that would also provided the other information for solving this by knowing the actual cause of that.