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#1
Unable to Boot After Power Loss
Hi,
My Windows 7 laptop recently suffered a power loss during shutdown (I've been running it without the battery since the battery could only provide about 10 minutes of power anyway). Upon turning on the laptop the next day, the computer automatically entered Windows Vista system recovery mode, and restarting the computer again didn't help. The laptop was running Windows 7 Pro, upgraded from an OEM installation of Windows Vista Ultimate.
I proceeded with startup repair, but the repair utility wasn't able to recognize any operating systems on my disk. Proceeding with the repair anyway, startup repair reports that the problem could not be automatically repaired. After that, I've tried the following:
This last step seems to suggest that the drive is physically intact, but for some reason, no implementation of Windows is able to read the data.
- Run chkdsk /f from the command prompt under the System Recovery Options window.
- After claiming that a few sectors were unreadable, chkdsk reports that it encountered an unexpected error
- Connect the laptop harddrive to another computer as a secondary drive and run chkdsk /f
- chkdsk identifies the supposedly unreadable sectors and proceeds to stage 2 and sometimes stage 3, but eventually encounters an unexpected error nonetheless
- While attempting to repair the affected sectors, chkdsk reports that there is insufficient space to recover the lost data
- The data partition on the harddrive appears to be readable in explorer, but the former system partition appears to be unreadable.
- Put the harddrive back into the laptop and perform startup repair from Windows 7 installation disk
- Startup repair is still unable to recognize the operating system on the harddrive.
- From here, I've also tried using diskpart to set the partition with the Windows installation as "active". After doing so, startup repair is still unable to recognize the OS on the disk, and still complains that the problem could not be repaired automatically.
- After completing the above and restarting the computer, I found that I can't even enter the system recovery options window anymore.
- Connect the laptop harddrive to another computer and try to read the harddrive from Ubuntu.
- All files appear to be accessible and there is no evidence of damage to the drive. Even the free space remaining in the drive appears to be what it was before the crash.
At this point, I am out of ideas. I am really hoping to avoid having to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows, unless I can also back up all the 5 years worth of applications also installed on the computer, some of which I no longer have the keys for.
I would really appreciate any suggestions on what to do from here.
Thanks!