Problems getting Windows Recovery to work

Hi - I hope someone can help. I've trawled the net but can't find an obvious solution.

I'm running Windows 7.1 (64 bit) on a Dell XPS 8500 desktop. A little while ago I got the dreaded black screen at startup and Windows wouldn't load. Tried to recover using the Windows Repair Disc but nothing worked so I did a fresh install of Windows from a Dell supplied USB. Thankfully my PC is up and running again.

Trying to reduce the risk of going through a long and tedious new install again, I checked whether my fresh Windows Repair Disc was working and would allow me to make less drastic repairs using the automatic repair or system restore options. No joy !

The automatic repair option gave me a diskpart error - the instruction referenced memory at x. The memory could not be read. When I went to system restore no operating system was not found. Perhaps Windows Repair was not reading the internal HD with the operating system on the C: partition.

To establish whether this was so I ran the Diskpart command from the command prompt within Windows Recovery. Sure enough only the two external HDs were detected. I then ran the command within Windows and all the discs showed up as they do in Disk Management - see attachment. The OEM partition appears to be empty while the Recovery partition seems to have files within it.

Does anyone have any idea please as to why Windows doesn't recognise Disc 0 when in Recovery mode ? My only thought is that perhaps I corrupted the OEM and Recovery partitions when I attempted an unsuccessful restore using Acronis before I carried out the Win 7 reinstall mentioned at the start.

Any suggestions welcome but I do have a working Win 7 PC at the moment so I wouldn't want to do anything too drastic to mess this up. I'm just preparing for a possible future calamity !

I wouldn't worry or use a repair the way forward is to use imaging software to do regular backups with that you can restore in a few mins booting from the imaging software

Yeah, trueimage or something similar SW to image hdd is the best option.
You can restore in minutes and have back your perfectly working PC.

samuria said:

I wouldn't worry or use a repair the way forward is to use imaging software to do regular backups with that you can restore in a few mins booting from the imaging software

Thanks. Yes, I think that's the way forward. I've used Acronis in past but not 100% reliable. What wld you recommend please ?

Thanks Roland. I've read good reports about MR so I've added that to my armoury. I have Acronis True Image 2013. The last time I did a restore it got nearly to the end and returned a fail message with what seemed like hundreds of errors on the partition in question. Acronis have a good upgrade offer at the moment so I may buy the latest version.