I aligned my partitions and botched Windows Recovery!

Have a look at your CBS.log from system file checker.

SFC stores the results in the CBS.log which you find in C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. This is a massive file of approximately 5MB and if you care to see it all, you must send CBS.log to one of your own folders or the desktop from where you can double click on it. It will then open with Notepad. Note: You cannot open it inside the CBS folder. You will get an Access denied message.
But most likely you are only interested in the part that shows the corrupted files that were fixed – or not fixed. For that you need a significant data reduction. You do that as follows:
Open another elevated Command Prompt and paste this command into it:

findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\logs\cbs\cbs.log

This will show all the files you want to see in the Command Prompt window. Since that window is not very practical for a detailed study, you want to paste the content into a Notepad, Wordpad or Word file.
For that you right click on the Command Prompt window (any place is good) and click Select All. Then you right click anywhere in the window. Now this whole text is stored on the clipboard and you can paste it into a document file (e.g. Notepad) where you can analyze it.

PS: This is an extract from one of my tutorials on my blog, but since we cannot cross reference, I pasted it.

Right. I'm still in an unbootable mode right now so, no Notepad, Wordpad, etc.

I tried that command, but it says "findstr" is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

chkdsk stopped being rude. Now it says I can dismount the drive and it will run chkdsk or it will run chkdsk on restart. Tried it on restart, same stupid blinking cursor. Will try via dismount. (EDIT: now the stupid thing tells me it's write-protected again!)

~Ibrahim~

EDIT:

Just to be clear. Startup Repair thinks the OS should boot successfully and the operating system is visible in the recovery environment.

EDIT (10:43PM):

So I got chkdsk to run (had to specify drive; chkdsk c: /f) and it found no errors.

Hmm, you really have all sorts of problems. The findstr command is a perfectly legal command which runs perfectly well here.
It looks like you running around in circles. But glancing over your posts again it looks like you did not get your boot record fixed.

Should findstr work in the Recovery Environment? I tried it under x:/sources and under c: as the initial heading bit of a CMD line. :/

I'm going to reseat the hard drive and RAM and call it a night. Whew......

Thanks again for your help. Can you recommend any kind of 3rd-party program to fix bootup? Windows seems pretty sure everything is OK, but it's acting pretty stupid as of late.

~Ibrahim~

Have a look at this: How to repair MBR on Windows 7 | eHow.com

I also found this intersting statemenet in on thread:
The best temporary solution is to set a boot from a 7 Installation CD and do not press any button while "press any key..." that will lead in starting your 7 thanks to CDs bootloader

Perhaps I totally missed something.

You do not need to do anything for SSd alignments in Win7. it does this autmatically creating a 100MB partition and the main OS one correctly aligned.

if you want one single partition with everything, you do it w/Dispart prior to instal.

Either way, Win7 automatically aligns a SSD correctly from the start. No need to do anything

Sweet, I'll take a look at that, whs.

@wishmaster

Unfortunately, that is NOT true. Windows 7 is supposed to align your partitions, but, lol, when has Windows always done what it is supposed to?

I had WRONG alignment even after a fresh install of Windows 7. There, I am the exception to the world. Riddle me that. I wish Windows had done what it was supposed to be.



31K - BAD = wrong alignment.

~Ibrahim~

All right, I left "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD" for about ten minutes, nothing. Interestingly, it makes beeps now if I try to press a key, the exact same thing that happens if I want to long at the infamous blinking cursor.

I'll try bootsect again and also MBRWiz. :) Thank you so much for the suggestions. Something is missing, one little thing......

~Ibrahim~

Guys. I fixed it. It's doing the image restore now.

I called MS and they told me that you can't do an image restore unless ALL the drives are exactly as they were. Meaning when I was using my jump drive to initiate the recovery (because I can't eject the recovery disk to put in the image disk), it was counting that as a drive. So no go on using a jump drive to initiate the Windows Recovery Environment. That was what was the "the parameter is incorrect; 0x80070057" error.

I figured out a workaround that I should have seen INSTANTLY. All this time, it's been there. When you're selecting an image, Microsoft realized some people might have their images on external drives which require special drivers. You just go there and wala, you see a Browse icon. Go in there, right-click the optical drive, eject, put in the one with the image.

It's restoring now.

OH YEAH!

And, btw, if you were wondering, 3 is the limit of times you can clean install from an upgrade disk on 7. I had to call and get that working,too.

~Ibrahim~