New
#1
Windows 7 not starting at all
(My specs are up to date: TL;DR Win7 HP, Samsung 960 SSD)
Background:
A couple days ago, I installed NordVPN on my PC. No problems with it. Last night my PC was running fine, except for some excessive lag on a game I was playing and I was the only one lagging. Shouldn't have been the VPN because I set a tunnel for it to get to the server. But, I decided to disconnect from the VPN and reboot to see if that affect the lag.
(BTW, I am not home. I am working remotely for the Summer and do not have my Win7 install CDs with me.)
Upon reboot, I get to a "Windows did not shut down properly" screen with an option to run a repair or start normally. If I chose start normally, I get booted to the BIOS. If I chose the repair, I would go into a loop of repair not working and reboot to the same two options.
I boot to my other HD, which has an older Win7 installation on it (which I stopped using because Windows Update stopped working there). From there, I could see the main drive and had no trouble checking that files were there in Windows Explorer.
On the older installation, I create a startup repair CD and boot from it, hoping it can fix Windows on the main drive. I am not sure it ever did anything useful. At some point, it said it was going to repair something and then it failed to repair it. I suspect that it never found the main drive and was busy doing bad things to my older installation. Now I cannot boot from the older installation, either. So, yay. Thinking, I am better off repairing the main drive and not getting confused with the repair trying to fix something that formerly worked, I disconnect the older drive.
Current state:
Now, startup repair CD seems not to find the main SSD (if it ever did) or any Windows installations. I suspect that it does not have the SSD drivers for my newer SSD or something. Anyway, I am currently unable to boot from the main Windows 7 installation (or the older one) and have no working Windows 7 PCs. My laptop is a Win10 machine that I am using now.
When I run the startup repair on the Win7 machine, it loads files, lets me choose a keyboard region, fails to find any installed OS (there is a button to load drivers, but I don't know where they would be). I don't know where to go from there.
Any pointers to the next step?