Overwriting one copy of Windows 7 with another?

Okay, long story short, i've been using Windows 7 since the beta leaked back in April 2009, I've had it on my laptop since August '09, with almost no issues.

Well, my laptop decides to refuse to power on. Not just boot, the power button had no response. 3 months later, i finally find a cheap motherboard for it, and swap it out.

In that 3 months, i had taken the hard drive out, and had used it as a slave drive in my family's desktop. I'd occasionally boot directly to the drive itself, and after the first boot, it automatically obtained all the drivers for the desktop. All was well.

Well, about a week before my motherboard arrived, Windows 7 freaked and reset the permissions for every one of the 401,541 files on the partition during a scheduled chkdsk (replacing invalid security ID with default security ID). Now, it'll boot, but after the "Windows Loading" animation, it'll give me a black screen and a cursor. Nothing more. no key combinations (so no replacing sethc.exe with cmd.exe), no nothing. I can move the cursor, and turn the computer off.

I know it's not the hard drive, due to the fact that i'm using Ubuntu (set it up about 5 months before the computer crashed).

Now, instead of backing the partition up and wiping it, i've got a better idea.


1. Back up the /windows/ directory from my laptop to my external drive.

2. Install Windows 7 onto a blank hard drive using my desktop.

3. Using Linux (ignores windows permissions), copy THAT windows installation to my laptop's hard drive, after deleting the /windows/ folder there.

4. Using the newly copied installation, take ownership of the old windows folder on the external drive, especially the registry and such, and give the administrators full read/write access.

5. overwrite the new copy of windows with the one i just set permissions on, and from there, take ownership of all the rest of the files

Would that work? I've never tried something as drastic as this, but i'm not too fond of having to reinstall a year's worth of programs. Even so, would it be possible to just take ownership of the registry after reinstalling it?

breakingspell said:

Okay, long story short, i've been using Windows 7 since the beta leaked back in April 2009, I've had it on my laptop since August '09, with almost no issues.

Well, my laptop decides to refuse to power on. Not just boot, the power button had no response. 3 months later, i finally find a cheap motherboard for it, and swap it out.

In that 3 months, i had taken the hard drive out, and had used it as a slave drive in my family's desktop. I'd occasionally boot directly to the drive itself, and after the first boot, it automatically obtained all the drivers for the desktop. All was well.

Well, about a week before my motherboard arrived, Windows 7 freaked and reset the permissions for every one of the 401,541 files on the partition during a scheduled chkdsk (replacing invalid security ID with default security ID). Now, it'll boot, but after the "Windows Loading" animation, it'll give me a black screen and a cursor. Nothing more. no key combinations (so no replacing sethc.exe with cmd.exe), no nothing. I can move the cursor, and turn the computer off.

I know it's not the hard drive, due to the fact that i'm using Ubuntu (set it up about 5 months before the computer crashed).

Now, instead of backing the partition up and wiping it, i've got a better idea.


1. Back up the /windows/ directory from my laptop to my external drive.

2. Install Windows 7 onto a blank hard drive using my desktop.

3. Using Linux (ignores windows permissions), copy THAT windows installation to my laptop's hard drive, after deleting the /windows/ folder there.

4. Using the newly copied installation, take ownership of the old windows folder on the external drive, especially the registry and such, and give the administrators full read/write access.

5. overwrite the new copy of windows with the one i just set permissions on, and from there, take ownership of all the rest of the files

Would that work? I've never tried something as drastic as this, but i'm not too fond of having to reinstall a year's worth of programs. Even so, would it be possible to just take ownership of the registry after reinstalling it?

You can take ownership files the files but not the registry. Frankly you are better off re-installing.

Ken J

taking ownership of the registry should be as simple as giving the administrators full read/write access of the /windows/system32/config/ folder and it's files, right?

i'll try it later tonight (when nobody's using the desktop), and let it back up overnight