OS not recognized in System Recovery Options

dudex1 · 10 Sep 2012

I have one mess on my hands.

Some history, I had first installed Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a unpartitioned 640GB drive. I then partitioned my other 320GB drive to install two things:
A FAT32 30GB partition of Windows XP Home
A NTFS 160GB partition of Windows 7 Home Premium x64
The remaining space (around 108GB) was left unpartitioned

I then decided to uninstall Windows Vista. So I opened up EasyBCD and deleted the entry, then deleted the partition (this was after backing up all files.) So I erased the partition. When I went to start up Windows 7 I got an error code saying:

File: \windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000428
Info: WIndows cannot verify the digital signature for this file.

It tells me that I can either use the recovery tool with the Windows 7 disc or press F8 to temporarily disable the driver signature enforcement.

The problem is that F8 doesn't work (if I go back and press F8, I get the same error screen) and when I put in the Windows 7 disc and boot up from it, none of my OS entries show up in the recovery console.

Now because I have a multiboot system, I can boot into XP fine. It's just the Windows 7 entry that produces the error message.

So I'm stuck. I've been searching around for days and everyone either says to use the disc (which doesn't work) or to reinstall Windows (which I would prefer not to do because I can't find another key and don't want to use another Key for Office 2010).

Some more info, when I boot into Ubuntu live usb, all the partitions are present and all the files in Windows 7 are present including winload.exe on the Win 7 partition.

I know where I went wrong now (I didn't transfer over the bootmanger to the Windows 7 partition) but I can't seem to fix this after the fact. Please help if you can.

Golden · 10 Sep 2012

dudex1 said:

or to reinstall Windows (which I would prefer not to do because I can't find another key and don't want to use another Key for Office 2010

Hi,

Can you please explain what you mean by find "another" key? You should already have the required key to perform the installation.

Regards,
Golden

dudex1 · 13 Sep 2012

Hello,

The product keys that are given are usually only for 3 uses. If possible, I wouldn't want to use up one of these 3 copies.

bigmck · 13 Sep 2012

dudex1 said:

Hello,

The product keys that are given are usually only for 3 uses. If possible, I wouldn't want to use up one of these 3 copies.

You can reinstall Windows as many times as you want on the same machine. Just do a reinstall. During the reinstall there will be a place that asks "Do you want to activate online?". You will uncheck the box and answer no. When Windows is installed and is operating as you like, you can go back and input your Key and activate it. You have 30 days to do this. Use this tutorial to aid in the install.
Clean Install Windows 7 With the problems you are having, you could continue to try and repair it or do a Clean Install. The Clean Install will take a little time, but it beats looking for a needle in a haystack.