Windows failure to start, Repair fails, cmd can only see X drive

Have you tried wiping the SSD with Diskpart Clean Command from installer Command Line to clear the boot sector, then doing a Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 which steps are the same for retail?

No I haven't yet. Having to reinstall the whole shebang (and thus rebuild programs that i have trouble getting to pay nice) is what i was trying to avoid.


In other news:

---I copied registry hives from system32/config/regback to system32/config. This changed something - now I can get to a boot screen, but it couldn't load. tried to start in safe mode which i can now access but it stopped talking to the drive before I could enter my password. Eventual BSOD.

---chkdisk is still stopping on some $I30 indexing error.

---starting from last known good configuration gave me a bsod and restarted

---ran startup repair again 3 times in a row. and it now says my root cause is "a patch is preventing the system from starting"
repair action - system restore
result - failed. error code 0x2
repair action - system files integrity check and repair
result - failed. error code 0x3

---sfc scannow reports there is some operation waiting to complete so i should reboot windows and let it finish before i can do scannow (which of course i can't do).

--did "bootrec /RebuildBcd (though I can't find this "bcd" file anywhere at all so i don't know what it's doing/editing) -- it reports zero windows installations but that the operation completed successfully.


Anyway, oes that give you any new ideas? I'm fairly close to giving up, but I just feel like it's SO CLOSE, and it toys with me by making slight improvements and then I have hope.

I'd run a few more Startup Repairs to see if it clears the pending repair to complete its work.

You could have reinstalled it several times by now following the steps to get a perfect reinstall, then saving a backup image of your setup which can be reimaged in 20 minutes. This is the modern way to deal with intractable issues like this, saving hours and days of time.

gregrocker said:

I'd run a few more Startup Repairs to see if it clears the pending repair to complete its work.

You could have reinstalled it several times by now following the steps to get a perfect reinstall, then saving a backup image of your setup which can be reimaged in 20 minutes. This is the modern way to deal with intractable issues like this, saving hours and days of time.

thanks, will do. actually rebuilding the computer and getting ITK and VTK to play nice AND have python and tcl wrapping work for me does take hours and even days of time. i probably could have reinstalled once at this point. it's very finicky. i was hoping to not have to do that again. reinstalling other programs is just time vs troubleshooting so yes i realize that part is not a huge deal. i also have a bit of a disease where i want to know why stuff happens and i tend to get frustrated with my computers when you just can't always do that.

i do think i didn't know win7 had a build in way to image your drive til all of this so i will try to make use of that next time around.