Solved Cant run 'Repair your computer' booting from Win7 DVD

[abernee]

Apologies in advance for long post but I believe the more info I give to anyone trying to help the better.

I am having a bit of a problem trying to repair my windows 7 Home Premium installation. I booted the computer from the windows 7 installation disk and selected 'Repair your computer' then received the error message 'This version of System recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair...'. After a lot of googling I discovered that this error may be shown if trying to repair a windows installation if it has SP1 and the installation disk does not. I downloaded an iso of win7 home premium with SP1 and burnt it to a disk. When I try to repair with this disk I get the same message.

Here is a history of why I came to be repairing in the first place.

Played Skyrim - computer crashed every time and when I restarted got the message 'bootmanager not found' (or something similar) After restarting the computer again windows would load fine.

Stopped playing skyrim but played many other games with no repeat of this problem.

3 months or so later (2 days ago) - Installed XCom Enemy unknown demo and played for 10 mins before computer crashed with a return of the 'bootmanager not found' message. This time I could not get windows to load at all, I kept getting this message.

I read on the internet how to fix the bootmanager by booting from the windows disk, choosing command prompt from the system recovery options and entering the command 'bootrec /fixmbr' (note that at this point I can select the 'Repair your computer option' and run the System recovery options)

After doing this Windows still wont load and I now cant even run the Startup repair because of this wrong version error message.

I have another hard disk in the computer with a working, clean copy of win 7 on it (had this disk disconnected while trying all these repairs) if this would be useful to access info on borked install.

It would be possible for me to use this windows to copy all important stuff of the broken windows and onto another drive. Then just reinstall but I really dont want to have to do this.

Sorry if I've gone on a bit but if anyone knows how I can fix this problem I would be very happy.

 

[gregrocker]

Work through these steps for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot which include everything possible that can be done up to rescuiing your files and running Recovery or Reinstalling.

I would use the latest official installer provided to run the boot repairs given, after trying to access Repair console on F8 Advanced boot tools. You may need the installer for reinstall anyway.

 

[abernee]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I followed the guide and booted up with the partion wizard disk. Both the system partition and the other partition needed to be restored. Also rebuit the MBR just to be sure. After doing this I was able to run the system recovery options from the recovery disk ( had to do it twice ) and voila, now windows works again.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[gregrocker]

Well done following the steps to successful completion. Many don't want to do the work.