Troubleshoot looping boot issue - W7 Ent

[iburnell]

Our corporate build is W7 Enterprise SP1. A laptop went "missing" and now suddenly reappears !..!

It will not boot starts up shows the press escape for start menu and restarts constantly looping

Have tried using W7ent on USB to get to recovery menu. Nothing to repair. However, if I open the command prompt I notice there is a Windows.~BT folder. Doing a bit of googling suggests it could be a failed upgrade to windows 8 and the time of folder creation is 20:33 which would suggest somebody took the laptop and tried to do an in-place upgrade to Windows 8, failed and decided to put the laptop back

How can I do some digging to find out information ? - I don't want to destroy the data on the disk but I'd like to be able to get win 7 back up to look at eventlogs or perhaps copy these logs off to interrogate ?

any thoughts - thanks !

 

[GokAy]

Would this help you restore W7? http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/219533-troubleshooting-windows-7-failure-boot.html

Check the last post in windows - Event Viewer from Recovery Command Prompt - Server Fault.

 

[gregrocker]

You can browse in using the Win7 disk to see if files are recoverable using Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console.

You can boot in with Partition Wizard CD to look at the partition structure to see if it's been changed and if the correct System Reserved (if present) or C (if not) is still Partition Marked Active . If not and it still doesn't start then try Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times .

Everything else that can be done is in Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

If not then I'd wipe and Clean Reinstall Windows 7