BSOD 7B, The Long Nightmare...

I hope so also. I'd like to think that in 2010, after 60+ years of research in the computing sciences, there is an alternative to "Sorry Bud, you gotta reinstall..."

It's been a while, but I'd like to thank everyone for the help.

To summarize the endgame, I gave up and did a fresh install, but even that required some work.

For a variety of reasons, my system partition is E:\ . A fresh install of Windows 7 renames any system partition to C:\, which I didn't want. (TAKE NOTE MICROSOFT, I HAVE STUFF THIS WAY FOR A REASON, SO DEAL WITH IT!!!!!!!!)

Soooooooo....I did the install, edited the registry offline to everything points to E:, used Partition Manager to rename C: to E: and rearrange the other things that were done and then got it back up and running (actually kinda limping).

I then took my backup software hive and used that in the running installation, and ended up with quite a few programs magically reinstalled (I also copied over my saved "program files" folder and folders from "Users" where the software repair info is kept. Things were still kinda limping along due to the hacking I did, so I tried an UPGRADE install from the running Windows 7 install, and things are now humming along. I still need to reinstall some software and lost a favorite picture of our dogs that was somewhere that got whacked, but I'm finally climbing out of the hole.

Hi Thorsen,

Thanks for the link to the recovery tool. I'll give it a try. Believe or not, the E: drive system partition is a holdover from the old old days when I had a dual boot DOS and NT system. DOS was on C:, NT was a fresh install on E:. I was using SCSI at the time, when 2Gig drives were the max. I would just add another drive to the chain and install stuff.

Later, whenever I'd ghost the system or do an upgrade, I retained the partition layout.

Now, I needed to retain the E: designation so I could try (mostly successfully) to use the old software hive in the new installation without having to change all those references as well as the references in the system hive (which was bad enough).

Thanks again,

Jeff