Locked out, what to I try next?

1.

The pnp letter assignments are odd. Not sure why the earlier letters arent assigned and my boot media is supposed to auto allocate letter Y to the usb stick.
In addititon this is strange:

RECOVERY (E:) 5.16 GB free of 11.7 GB
RECOVERY (R:) 5.16 GB free of 11.7 GB

Might be a partition table error. You could run diskgenius and see if it finds a problem.
In the top pane click Tools , then from the menu check partition table


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2. Did you run chkdsk ?

There is also the option to check for bad sectors using diskgenius.

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3. Image.swm 3,788,794 KB
Image2.swm 2,374,410 KB

Sounds like the manufacturer recovery files used to reinstall windows. ( .swm indicates a split wim file )

You can load install.swm in 7-zip and see what is in it.

You could also run dism++ , select tools in left pane, select imagex, then browse to install.swm and it should show you basic info.

You could then try dism++ system restore:

First format partition W: to NTFS

then point dism++ system restore at install.swm and try restoring to W: ( if there are two images shown in install.swm, select the larger one)

( it could also be done by File>apply image but that is slightly different procedure )
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4. NOTE - you can take screenshots using the little camera icon on the booted media taskbar. Save the pictures onto the usb stick ,so they can be posted up here.

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5.

BOOT (X:) 28.6 MB free of 31.0 MB

It is not clear to me what you are running. The 17514x64v30.iso media should show .99gb assigned to X:

If you are using my boot media, it should look something like this with the letter Y assigned to the usb stick and X: as 0.99gb

then reboot the new .ISO from within DISM++

you cant reboot an iso from within dism++.

Presumably you have win7 installation media in an .iso file?

You could copy the contents of the .iso file onto the 17514x64v30 usb stick - but do not overwrite the boot.wim that is already on the usb stick.

That way you could run windows setup.


OR you could just copy the install.wim from the windows 7 installation .iso onto the usb stick.

That way you could browse to the install.wim on the usb stick using dism++ an Apply it - or probably easier to use winntsetup which will automatically create the boot critical files.

However, neither dism++ nor winntsetup do partitioning. So the disk needs to be partitioned first.

No joy tried booting from your USB3_WIN7_2021 file

Why?

There is a .zip file of that name. It is not bootable. It contains an update and some drivers which can be integrated into installation media to add usb3 support.