Repair Install

Brink said:

Hello Jim,

Not always. You might post your BCD issue in a new thread to see if we may be able to help fix it first instead. :)

Already have.

It's here :- Windows 7 will not recover with original DVD used to install it


Decided to give Repair Install a try using Option 5 but after I select Upgrade I get:-

Windows 7 Professional cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. You can choose to install a new copy of Windows 7 Professional instead, but this is different from an upgrade, and does not keep your files, settings, and programs. You’ll need to reinstall any programs using the original installation discs or files. To save your files before installing Windows, back them up to an external location such as a CD, DVD, or external hard drive. To install a new copy of Windows 7 Professional, click the Back button in the upper left-hand corner, and select “Custom (advanced)”.


Guess I'll need to wait for a solution to my BCD problem.

I'm part way through the repair install. I'm at the point where the installer finished copying Windows files and is gathering Files, Settings and Programs.




It has been running for about 3 hours and is at 50% complete. My PC has 4 physical disk drives configured as two striped RAID arrays. Disk C: has the OS and program files and D: has my data. I have configured Windows so that "My Documents" are on the D: (Data) drive. I'm beginning to suspect that the RI is copying "My Documents" to it's temporarary storage area so that it can restore them at the end of the repair. If that's the case then I may have a problem soon.

My C: drive is about 900GB (0.9 TB) and has about 200 GB in use (just OS and programs). My D: drive is a similar size but only has about 200 GB free. If the RI is doing what I suspect I may well run out of disk space on C: soon.

Can anyone confirm that this may be what is happening and whether I can run RI without copying data that's on a different disk?

If it does fail, will it roll back to it's pre-RI state and allow me to temporarily point "My Documents" back at the C: drive?

Hello Norman,

3 hours is a bit of time for a RI. What percentage complete are you sitting at now since it's been 4 hours later?

If the RI fails, then it will normally give you an error and roll back to the pre-RI state. With your "My Documents" locatedd on another drive, it may not be included in the RI. If so, you should still be able to copy it's contents back into to the new one.

Thanks for replying.

The "Gathering Files, Settings and Programs" step finished about 45 minutes ago (after 8.5 hours). It then started expanding files and re-booted at 18%. When it restarted the expanding files took another 45 minutes nand it has now finished "Installing features and updates" and is "Transferring files, settings and programs" as I type. It remains to be seen whether it takes a similar amount of time to copy everything back.

At least I didn't run out of disk space. I'll report back later. It's just reported it's 35% completed so maybe it wont take as long.

Wow, I sure hope not.

OK, it's just re-booted and preparing computer for first use so not as bad this time. Total time for RI 9.5 hours.

Just off for some grub so will complete it a bit later. Will report back fully later or tomorrow. (It's 18:30 UK time).

Thanks for your support and interest.

Another 7 hours of installing updates and SP1 but all done now. There were over 100 updates and that was before SP1 was given as an option. When I tried to download them all and install them as a batch the process failed and rolled back. The system doesn't show which one(s) caused the failure so I resorted to installing them in small batches. This has worked.

Just done a final cleanup and now backing up C: to my D: drive.

I'll investigate some imaging options when that's done. I thought I'd use the tut on Slipstreaming Win7 SP1 onto a USB disk (in case I have to go through this again) but the RT7 Lite (beta 2.6.0 64 bit) program won't run so that needs further investigation.

Thanks again.

That's great news Norman. Thank you for posting back. :)