Solved Can't boot or repair Win 7 after replacing CMOS battery

[Durango]

I apologize for the length of my post, but I have gone thru several steps in trying to solve my problem.
I turned my Win-7 PC on and got the error message "CMOS/GPNU checksum bad".

Research suggested one cause might be the CMOS battery (#2032), which I replaced. I entered BIOS and everything looked good except for the date/time, which I reset. I then rebooted and got the error message "invalid partition table". At that point I inserted my Win-7 installation DVD to try and repair my installation. Unfortunately, no OS was found on the hard drive. So I selected the option to re-image (using a fairly recent system image stored on an external drive). After about an hour, the process was finished and I got the message that the restore was successful. A system restart was then required, but it was not successful....I once again got the error message "invalid partition table".

I also got the message that the reason that the startup repair was not successful was because 'no OS found on disk".

Any help/advice would be appreciated. At last resort I could try a complete reinstall of Win-7 but I would probably lose a lot of data that I had been backing up via the system image.

 

[BorisTheAnimal]

Hi Durango,

I would try the following:

1. Turn off the laptop/desktop
2. Unplug the External USB HDD (and all other USB devices)
3. Make sure ALL media bays (SD Card reader and DVD drive) are empty
4. Go into the BIOS config on boot up, and configure the boot sequence to leave off everything except Internal HDD, and CD/DVD (turn off the USB and secondary (if any exists) HDD from the boot sequence)
5. Reboot - and hopefully windows should resume without any error message.

Cheers
Boris

 

[Durango]

Hi Durango,

I would try the following:

1. Turn off the laptop/desktop
2. Unplug the External USB HDD (and all other USB devices)
3. Make sure ALL media bays (SD Card reader and DVD drive) are empty
4. Go into the BIOS config on boot up, and configure the boot sequence to leave off everything except Internal HDD, and CD/DVD (turn off the USB and secondary (if any exists) HDD from the boot sequence)
5. Reboot - and hopefully windows should resume without any error message.

Cheers


Boris

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been gone all day so will try it first thing in the morning. I might add that I did try but couldn't even do a clean re-install. My hard drive has 3 partitions and I tried them all....I kept getting the error message "Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing partition".

Again, thanks.........I will keep you posted on my results.

 

[Durango]

Boris, I tried your suggestion without any success (but I thank you anyway). I think my 11-year old hard drive has failed. I even used several bootrec commands without success, including RebuildBcd. As a last resort, I deleted the 3 partitions on my drive (one of which was my Win 7 partition) and then tried to reinstall Win 7 but kept getting Setup errors regarding lack of a system partition.

So I have decided to replace the hard drive, do a Win 7 reinstall, and then restore from a system image I have on an external drive. Hopefully I will retain most of my settings and data.

One last question if you don't mind. My previous Win 7 installation was actually an upgrade from Vista. I am assuming that I will be able to now do a fresh install on my new drive using my upgrade installation disk......is that correct? Or will I have to go locate old installation disks, since as best I recall Vista was an upgrade from Win XP (this a really-old computer)?

Thanks again......Durango

 

[Durango]

Boris, before replacing my hard drive, I decided to first connect it to a different port on my motherboard. When I did, Win 7 Ultimate started reinstalling! I let the reinstall finish, and everything appeared normal. So overnight I did a system image restore using a fairly recent image saved on my external drive. Now (finally) I am back to where I was when the problem started; however, this 11-year old motherboard will remain suspect in future problems.

Thanks again for your input...........Durango

 

[BorisTheAnimal]

Hi Durango,

Well I'm sorry that I couldn't help you with your issue but nice that you got it working!