New
#1
Stuck in repair loop. Major help needed
I decided to upgrade my computer to Windows 7 about 3 weeks ago.
Everything had been running fine until this past week.
Windows started just acting.....strange.
It would randomly lock up, requiring a hard restart, the top bars on applications would flash, and random applications would fail.
Then came an update, the application failures stopped, but the application bar flashing remained, this I could deal with though.
I thought my problems were over.
Then 3 days ago my photo viewer stopped working, the application would open, but pictures would not load, it seemed to be in a perpetual loading state, could be related to the greater problem, I don't know.
Then the worst started in.
I began to get notification bubbles at the bottom left of my screen, telling me that certain files were corrupted.
They seemed unrelated to me, addon files in a game folder became corrupted, firefox files became corrupted, and thus firefox became unusable.
I decided to restart to see if it might alleviate any of said problems, then disaster.
Instead of a normal boot, it went automatically into startup repair mode.
It searched for any problems, even tried to fix them (as it says) and gave me the helpful "startup cannot repair this computer automatically" line.
So I decided to try my other options, only to find out I have NO restore points, whatsoever.
Startup repair can't fix anything, I have no restore points, and I am not dual booting 7.
My disk has not failed either, I can still access all my files when using it as an external.
Upon trying to boot as an external, it prompted me that certain .hal files were either missing or corrupt, the names of which escape me.
I need to know if there is a way to repair or upgrade my windows 7 installation without losing all of files already on the harddrive.
I have a newer build of 7 bootable on disc, already installed is build 7000.
Although I know it is impossible to upgrade from the bootable disc, if not running a currently working version of Windows.
I need options before I decide to move my needed files off the harddrive and do a clean install, as it would be most time consuming and frustrating.
Might there be a way to upgrade the OS while the harddrive is being used as an external? Or some other way to repair my installation?
Any help would be MOST appreciated!