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Windows 7 won't boot, trying to recover MBR! Don't want to lose import
Hi Everyone,
A friend of mine experienced a BSOD crash on their Windows 7 computer. Unfortunately I was not in a position to see the exact message that was presented, however in my experience this doesn't always make a great deal of difference. After offering to fix my friend's computer I quickly discovered that one of the installed RAM sticks is faulty. I replaced both RAM sticks, and tested - all is fine on the RAM front. However the hard drive also appears to be corrupt. Windows 7 will not boot, and I have tried the following to rectify the situation:
1). Booted into Windows Recovery (using the W7 installation disk)
2). Windows didn't detect an Operating System install, so I made my way to the Command Prompt
3). Executed a number of commands that would normally fix the MBR and other boot related issues, notice after both the bootrec.exe /fixmbr & the bootrec.exe /fixboot commands reported "...completed successfully"! Then I issued the bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd command and Windows 7 promptly informed me that it couldn't find any Windows installations...
4). I then considered the possibility that the wrong partition may be set active on the disk, so I tried swapping the Active partitions around (and once this didn't achieve anything I switched back!)
Having had no success with the Recovery options I physically removed the hard disk and connected it to a docking bay -
*** Whilst the docking bay is connected to Windows 7 (64 bit) I get the following message ***
*** When I then use an XP Virtual Machine, and connect the drive to it I get a slightly more promising message ***
I still really want to recover this disk, and boot into Windows 7 from it. There is quite a bit of personal data on this disk that my friend cannot replace. Any suggestions on how I might go about fixing this will be greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Davo