Solved Need help following a Windows 7 boot incident

[knallop]

Folks, this is my first post, so if it's in the wrong place, please tell me where to start this thread, and I'll move it.

My laptop recently failed to boot properly. It went as far as displaying the desktop, complete with wallpaper and program icons, but nothing would work. Windows Explorer would fire up and display files, but it was the oly program I could find that would work, and if I changed folder, it took about 2-3 minutes - and the next attempted operation would make the OS fall over. I didn't know if I had a disk/file problem, or whether it could have been the hardware of my aging laptop. The PC disk was 500 GB, but I had a 250 GB lying about, which I had used as a TV recorder, so I formatted it and built a Win-7 system on it from the installation DVDs. That works (it's what I'm using at this instant).

I tried the "Repair Disk" option on the installation DVD, and now (with the original disk in), it shows the desktop, and some of the icons fire up programs (I played a Solitaire!) - but the system is barely working, and I'm really not sure what is going on, or what to do about it.

The original disk can be read (but not booted from) on USB. I had thought of getting a SSD, putting a system on it (W-7), upgrading to W-10, then copying my files from the failing disk.

I'm a retired electronics / computer engineer. I've worked on lots of stuff during a lifetime in the industry, but most recently, I was maintaining RAID arrays on large Unix systems. So I have some notions, even regarding PCs (which I have used as a terminal ever since the Grid (remember them?), but mostly, I have been a laptop user, and if I had a fault on it, we had an IT department that would take care of it - so my relation to Windows is a bit like that of a car driver who has no idea how to fix an engine that won't start.

 

[file3456]

On the surface it sounds like the hard drive is going South. I'm sure you thought of that already. The other possibility is malware. But I kinda doubt it.

Is this a platter hard drive or SSD?

You need to first start backing up important data right now without making any writes to the drive. If you want to make an exact clone of that problematic drive, try HDD Raw Copy Tool. It'll sector by sector copy all data, even corrupt data. Of course you do have the USB now, so I guess that's a backup so to speak.

If the USB can't boot, then it sounds like the copied over data is corrupt. Principally the bootloader and the files related to booting the drive. How are you booting the USB drive though? You can't just copy over the OS and expect it to boot from the USB straight away. You'll need to use something like WinToUSB to clone the current problematic system to USB. WinToUSB 6.5 Download | TechSpot

Chose this icon.




Of course, that might be easier said then done since the HDD is already acting up.


I would try to check the drive for errors using Hard Disk Sentinel. Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring ( I would not try the write test at this time) Hiren's Boot CD has hard drive testing tools as well. Hiren's BootCD PE You can use Ventoy to burn Hiren's to a USB stick and the after that's done add the HDD Raw Copy Tool (it's portable) to the USB drive its self. Now while booted in the live Hiren's Windows 10 environment, you can execute HDD Raw Copy Tool from the file sitting in the main HDD from "This Computer" in the live OS.

If no errors are found, maybe it's just the bootloader. Read here: MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record

Does Safe Mode work? You boot into Safe Mode by powering on the computer and keep taping the F8 key. The exact time you press the key is after BIOS load and prior to OS boot (Depending on the hardware, pretty damn quick). Chose the first safe mode option. Networking loads the necessary network drivers so you have network/ Internet capability. If there were network issues you'd want to not use this mode to rule out network issues. In other words, isolating the network stack and its dependencies.


If you can boot into the OS, you can try a repair install. How To: Windows 7 Repair Install

As a test, you could always try a repair install on the USB first, and see what happens. Just make sure you backup your data to a safe form of media prior to doing ANYTHING! Data has a nasty habit of just disappearing and whether file recovery software works or not, paid for services are expensive. Again, that USB you have there has to be made to boot. I think programs like WinToUSB kinda make the OS get drunk so to speak so they boot.


Ventoy

 

[knallop]

F22 Simpilot, thanks for a response that has clearly been the result of experience, and which must have taken some time to bash out. To answer your questions, both the failing 500 GB drive and the 250 GB drive I'm using now, are platter-type drives. My PC usually sits on my desk and never gets moved, but the incident happened after I had been to stay with my daughter for a couple of days.

You said "If the USB can't boot, then it sounds like the copied over data is corrupt." I think I didn't ex-lain myself well enough. The USB drive that can't boot is the same physical drive that won't boot when in the PC as its resident C:\ drive. No data has been copied over, apart from a world of AutoHotKey scripts which I have written over time, and which I use constantly. The scripts are text files, and are interpreted on the fly as long as AutoHotKey is running.

As we'll be referring to them, for short-hand, let's call the drives ...
D500 - the original 500 GB drive which now boots only up to showing the partly-functional desktop,
D250 - the spare drive that I have rebuilt with Win-7. It is too small to migrate everything to, so I consider it a temporary solution.
SSD - My dream of the future. It should give this old machine a new lease of life. I haven't bought it yet.

I didn't know about WinToUSB, but in fact, making D500 bootable on USB is not a primary objective.
Since the incicdent, I have done a good bit of reading, and have come to the conclusion that the MBR is a good candidate for explaining my issue - but as I can't get convincingly past the desktop with D500 as my C: drive, I don't know how to correct the MBR. If I could get D500 working again, that would be a great first step, as I would be able to use my environment again - such as Excel, which was important to me.

Hard Disk Sentinel seems a very capable program, but a lot of the basic features of the "Free trial version" are only available after paying for it, which I'm unwilling to do without knowing for sure that the drive is recoverable. Even if it is, it would only serve as a master for cloning to a SSD, so I could simply install a SSD then start rebuilding my system as if from new. It would be a pain, but there is some merit in a new beginning.

I can't figure out how to download Hireen's boot CD. When I click Download, nothing is downloaded, but it takes me to a download page with no download link on it.

I'm just about falling asleep on my keyboard, so I'll continue with this tomorrow. In the meantime, could you help me with what may seem like trivial info to you - but I don't know how to do it - if I copy a program (eg. Excel) from D500 on USB to D250 in my PC, how can I link it to the OS, so that it will be started from a button on the Start bar? Normally, that all gets set up by the installation program, but the Excel I was using was from Office 2000, so the installation files are long gone.

Thanks for your help so far. I'll carry on tomorrow. Must get my head down.

 

[file3456]

The ISO for Hiren's is at the bottom of the page: HBCD_PE_x64.iso

You need to backup the bad drive right away, and the HDD Raw Copy Tool should do the job just nicely copying ALL data corrupt or not, sector by sector.

As far as reinstalling a program that doesn't exist anymore. That's a hard one. Program installation involves a splatter all over the drive in the appdata folder, registry, system32 and God only knows where else. If by chance you still have the installtion disk that'll be your only hope I'm afraid. The free and open source LibreOffice has a form of Excel called Calc. It should do what you need, but some things might be a little different then what Excel had. Calc | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

Please go back and read EVERYTHING I said word for word again, especially safe mode. I'll fix the bad parsed BBcode and some verbiage I just now see.

P.S

This is why it is very important to always backup important data once in a while to multiple mediums both physical and in the cloud, and make a 1:1 hard drive clone every once in a while as the addition and manipulation of data on the OS dictates. For me, this is about every month or so.

For Cloud backup you can use Boxcryptor, though I never used it. I mostly use Box, Mega, and Amazon S3 with the S3 Browser program. The S3 Browser program has the ability to pass command line arguments for syncing on a schedule with the firing off a batch file via Task Scheduler. Just food for thought.

Absent of that, there is Cloudberry. I store all my backup media in three fireproof safes. They can be had for around $35/~26 GBP. The locks won't keep anyone out. They're just for fireproofing and waterproofing due water to put out the - fire if the God forbid there was fire. Safety depot boxes are costly, not fireproof, the Feds can raid them, and are not as secure as one would think... Protip: Learn about Veracrypt. Read the WHOLE manual.

P.P.S

Yes, I know all about Autohotkey. I never took the time to learn the language to do the things I wanted to do, so I use the very cool Macro Recorder by Jitbit. You can even compile its generated scripts into executable to fire off via the Task Scheduler or other programs. I actually have an elaborate system here where if anyone walks into the room while I'm gone, the computer's automatically turn off with forced persistence. Once off there's no way back in without brute-forcing a very long and complicated password that I committed to memory. LOL! How I disable this so I can get back in the room is highly classified above TOP SECRET information and not for public consumption. LOL!

Macro Recorder, Macro Program, Keyboard Macros & Mouse Macros

AH, looks like Cloudberry is some other company and pricing is probably for enterprise more than the individual. (Big money in cloud crap these days)... Cost Calculator for Managed Backup Service | MSP360™ (CloudBerry Lab)

 

[knallop]

Sorry I haven't been attentive to this - I have been ill (not Covid, but bad enough!). I think the worst is behind me now, but it may still be a week till I get back to this in earnest.
Thanks again for your attention and your effort.

 

[file3456]

No problem.

 

[knallop]

Simpilot, thanks again for all the advice you have given. It's pretty clear to me that you know a lot more about PC internals than I do, so some of your instruction was a bit daunting - but for other reasons also, I have decided that it's time for an upgrade. My current PC has an intermittent fault on it that has been there for about 5 years - the USB connection fails if certain parts of the PC are touched, so I have to get my daily podcasts downloading then hold my breath till it's finished. I've had the main board out 3 times trying to trace the problem with aerosol freezer, but althopugh I can produce the fault easily enough, I was never able to track it down. As long as nothing touches the PC, it seems to work, but it truly is _very_ sensitive. That's a fault that could have gone solid at some ;point in the future. Then there's the problem of getting my various software working again without the original installation programs - lost long since.

So I have bought a used Acer that has an SSD instead of an HDD, i5 instead of i3, 16GB instead of 8GB of memory (though I don't expect that to make much difference for what I do with the machine), Windows-10 instead of -7, and it has a full MS Office, where the one I was using was Office 2000. I should be able to import most of my data files into the new office (I use mainly Excel, but also some PowerPoint). Moving into a new PC is a bit like moving into a new house - it takes time to get things how you want them.

Your technical input has given food for thought, even if I didn't fix this old laptop - so it wasn't by any means wasted effort - so, once again, thank you.

 

[Megahertz07]

In my opinion, Win 7 is still a better OS.
Depending on the i5 you bought, it can be quite easy to install win 7 on it.
Don't though away your old laptop. It has a COA sticker with a Win 7 license that may be used on the i5.

 

[knallop]

I hear you!

Back in the dark days (which you may not remember, but I do), portable computers (the sort you went on site with) looked like sewing machines with a handle on the top. The first portable computers I used ran DOS, which was not multi-tasking. If you wanted to run a new program, you closed the one you were working with. The monitor was an orange-coloured plasma display, and they had no graphics, and text was presented as a 7 x 5 pixel matrix, and an 'i' took up as many x-pixels as a '#'. Then Windows came along - W-3.1 was the first Windows one I encountered - running as an application under DOS, and the formation of characters improved, and there were rudimentary graphics - low resolution, of course. Then the laptop appeared, and my first one was a Grid - still with a yellow plasma screen. Over time, colour emerged, resolutions became usable, and Windows improved through many iterations - but to be honest, I personally felt that computers had reached the stage of doing everything I wanted them to when Windows XP came out. I hung on for a long time, but I chickened out after the Wannacry attack, and moved onto Windows-7. My current laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook A544) came with installation DVDs for Win-7 (32 and 64 bit versions), and Win 8.1 32/64 - but I don't like the look of Win-8, so I have been using Win-7. I was loathe to move on to Win-10, but I still remember Wannacry and the havoc it caused, so I'd like to stay with a supported OS. I believe Win-10 will be retired in 3 years or so, and I have heard that W-11 will have a monthly subscription - and I hate that idea. Anyway, that's a problem to be solved when I get there. I wish I had got into Linux when it came out, so that it would be second nature by now - ah, the things that might have been. Look back in anger!

I was a field angineer for many years, and laptops and their disks cooked in my car in the Summer sun, and froze on Winter's nights, and of course, got carried and occasionally knocked - so I'm pretty lucky that my recent boot failure was the first disk problem I have ever had. For the last few years before I retired, I was maintaining RAIDs with about 250 disks in them - so I know for sure that disks do occasionally fail - but they were all in RAID-3 or RAID-5 redundant-disk arrays. They were moving towards RAID-6 when I left - just as well, because I couldn't grasp how it worked.

You spoke about the importance of backups - which I do anyway. I listen to a lot of podcasts (or I did till my machine fell over), and I had an AHK script that would handle all the downloads, transfer them to my MP3 player, then do a whole lot of backups of important stuff to a 64GB SD card in the MP3 player - so I did daily backups of a lot of the data files I need - like several Excel files - but they're not much good if I don't have Excel, and if I try to run it on the original drive (now on USB), Excel just says that it needs to be installed first. That's a lot of the reaon why I opted for a PC with MS Office on it. I hope it's going to read the data files that I saved using Office 2000 - but I think it will.

 

[file3456]

I wouldn't let something like Wannacry be a determining factor for things. There is and always will be polymorphic and zero-day malware. You could very well have malware on your computer now and not know it. To know for sure means understanding how to monitor for such things.

Windows 10 has a boat ton of telemetry. I've recorded at least 20 ASNs being used by Windows 10. I never saw this in a fresh install of Windows 7 or even XP. I have yet to test 11. Based on the fact 11 wants you to create a BS Microsoft account (can be bypassed) just to continue installation of the OS tells me everything I need to know about telemetry in 11. For the layman, it'll be pretty hard not knowing how to control your computer's and devices without all of the privacy invasion.

Your USB issue sounds like you're completing a path to ground and shorting out the USB header. No computer is just "dead." I probably could fix it. It's also possible there's something wrong with the USB internal header connection.

Your "cooked" and "frozen" computer woes could be alleviated with a Panasonic Toughbook. But they are very pricey. From police cars, ambulances and firetrucks, they all have Toughbooks. Probably even the U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security, Department Of Defense, etc. For local public safety, they are called an MDT (Mobile Data Terminal) in my neck of the woods they use cellular data. Probably a tier 1 cellular connection that gives them priority over other cell users. Same is probably true for the aforementioned U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security, Department Of Defense, etc. In your neck of the woods of the UK, Scotland yard, and the various elite police forces probably all use the TETRA system. Anyway... LOL


If you like Podcasts, Spotify has loads of them. Check out Thoughty2 and Jordan Peterson. There's also Leo Laporte. But I don't think he's on Spotify. He's got his own product and probably doesn't need them. I've read about shenanigans with Spotify... Thinking about ditching them because Spotify now chokes with my VPN and others are complaining of the same thing. I had Amazon music, and while great, my music tracks would just disappear and I had to add them back. Just got sick and tired of that crap. When I went to Spotify I imported my Amazon Music lists to Spotify with Soundiiz.


I mentioned LibreOffice and it probably could open those old Excel versions of spreadsheets... Won't be able to create in that proprietary format though. LibreOffice's Calc is no different than Excel however. Probably has some different macro stuff and what have you, but by in large, if you know Excel, you probably could pick up on Calc in LibreOffice.

Your technical input has given food for thought, even if I didn't fix this old laptop - so it wasn't by any means wasted effort - so, once again, thank you.

That's fine. When I make a post I know full well the information is for all to see and review. I've been a member of various computer forums all over the Internet since around circa 2006.


= OFF TOPIC =

This is why North Korea unleashed Wannacry. HAHA

NSFW

Team America: World Police (6/10) Movie CLIP - I'm So Ronery (2004) HD - YouTube