Serious Boot Catastrophe

gregrocker said:

What were the infection boot scan results which as explained are where you should start?

I am currently scanning with MSE and MBAM using a Win7 laptop with boot drive attached as slave. Will post screenshots when done, although I'm saying this again the drive is clean and this is a colossal waste of time.

Can we see a picture of the PW drive map? Attach using paper clip in reply box.

Where is the Active flag now? Did you run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times no matter what it reports?

It is on the 100MB System Reserved partition. Setting it on any other partition (including C) will result in BOOTMGR not found error message.

After clicking "repair my computer" in RE, occasionally there will be an automatic prompt to fix startup issues and reboot. This doesn't work. Starting Startup Repair manually never works, returns an error "Startup Repair was not able to repair this computer".

What was the result of System Restore run from System Recovery Options?
Try it again.

Two restore points from December are found and affected programs list loads, but proceeding will return an error along the lines of drive not found. System restore image exists on a secondary drive which I re-connected temporarily but non show up in the recovery menu.

A member from another forum has suggested these steps:
How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows

This implies a problem with drive letters (at last check RE reports my Windows installation was on G). Since I cannot reach the desktop the specific steps outlines above are not applicable but would it be possible to manually force new drive letter assignments from the command prompt or EasyRE liveUSB?

From MS technet:

You cannot assign drive letters to system volumes, boot volumes, or volumes that contain the paging file. You cannot assign a drive letter to an OEM partition or any GPT partition other than a basic data partition.

Your System REserved partition lacks the Boot flag (aka System in Disk Mgmt) which means it is not booting Win7, and requires repair untli it shows up.

We also cannot see the other drives to know if another drive further down is booting Disk0. Disk 3 is cut off just as it says "Rese--" which makes me wonder if it may be booting an EFI System.

Drive letters are not shown in PW and are often different in WinRE. What makes you think the issue is drive letter?

You can never rule out infection without at least one full boot scan since the OS may not repair if infected.

Hi Greg, very pleased to hear from you.

How should I go about putting the "boot flag" back onto my System Reserved partition?

Would you like me to boot up Partition Wizard again and take a picture with the window maximized?

I don't know if drive letters are the problem, merely wondering if they could have anything to do with my situation.

The MBAM and MSE scans are still running but are around 90% and should be finishing within the next half hour.

I'll refresh this page every 5 minutes. Thank you for your help. I have a 3D project that a client needs by Monday so this is particularly bad timing.

Regards,
Nicholas

If Disk0 is the only OS hard drive then it is an MBR install, so you should be booting the Win7 installation Media or System Repair Disk as a Legacy device and not UEFI. Additionally in BIOS setup there should be enabled either Legacy BIOS or Compatibility Support Module (CSM). Enter BIOS setup now by pressing the key given on first boot screen to report back what these settings are.

To repair Win7 if it is the only OS on the PC, unplug all other HD's, boot disk as Legacy (not UEFI) device, then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until Win7 starts.

If it won't start after you've confirmed the BIOS settings as given above, and run the three full Startup Repairs with reboots, then work through the steps for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start which attempts everything that can be done up to rescuiing your files to do a perfect reinstall. If this is your production machine then you should have a backup image to apply.

We should see the other HD's to know they don't have conflicting settings. When you plug them back in after Win7 is repaired make sure the Win7 HD remains set first to boot in BIOS.

Hi Greg, MSE finished awhile back but MBAM is still going so I'll just post this here first.



Once that's done I'll put the drive back into the big computer. Yes, this is a single-boot scenario and there is only one OS hard drive.

BIOS settings as follows:
SATA mode: AHCI
HPET: enabled
Legacy USB: enabled
PCI ROM priority: Legacy ROM

Would you like me to boot up Partition Wizard and take a larger screenshot to see the other HDs?

The UEFI choices are normally Legacy BIOS (different from USB) and/or Compatibility Support Mode (CSM). These need to be enabled for Legacy MBR install such as you have.

Watch this video to understand UEFI BIOS vs. Legacy BIOS - YouTube.

Yes it would be good to see all HD's listings.

Something I haven't tried before, hitting F8 and selecting "Disable automatic restart on system failure" and got this:

Technical information:
*** STOP: 0X0000007B (0XFFFF880009A98E8, 0XFFFFFFFFC000034, 0X000...000, 0X000...000)

Might be something to work with?

I'm now at the Startup Repair x3 part. On all 3 tries the result this time was:

"Restart your computer to complete the repairs."

Under diagnosis and repair details:

Root cause found: The partition table doe not have a valid System Partition.
Repair action: Partition table repair
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0

The exact same thing happens all 3 times, after which I am still unable to get past the Windows startup logo animation. On all 3 tries, nothing is shown in the list of Windows installations as well.